[MUSIC] One of the most significant impacts of digital and social media on marketing is that these new communication technologies have taken the power of mass communication from the hands of a few legacy media outlets and placed it in the hands of marketers, as well as consumers. In the digital age, marketers are no longer limited to a few media channels to reach consumers. Instead, they can directly engage and interact with existing and prospective customers on websites, search engines, social media platforms and mobile devices. At the same time, every internet user is potentially a brand advocate, or critic. They can easily and often instantly share opinions and experiences about a brand or a product with millions of people. Meanwhile, advanced technologies, such as artificial intelligence, predictive analytics, marketing automation and real-time bidding, allow companies to create and place target ads to be displayed alongside different types of media content. Instead of competing with other brands and products for the limited attention of the same audiences at the same time, digital marketers have the advantage of direct access to individual consumers at anytime, anywhere. The power of these digital media and information technologies, however, also brings new challenges. In this lesson, I'll discuss 3 challenges in today's digital marketing environment: Ad fraud, brand safety, and consumer privacy. Let's look at ad fraud. According to the IAB, ad fraud costs the industry $8.2 billion a year in the US alone. As advertising budgets keep shifting towards digital, fraudsters have found ways to gain the system and earn money by serving ads in ways that have no potential to be seen by a real person. There are many fraudulent and unethical practices in online displays advertising. They generally fall into 3 types. The first type of fraud takes advantage of a gap between the automated ad buying process and the actual viewability of online ads to human viewers. For example, online publishers can place multiple ads on top of one another in a single ad placement space. Only the top ad is viewable to humans, but all ads are recorded as valid impressions. Website operators can also stuff an entire only display ad into a tiny, one-by-one pixel on a webpage. The ad is recorded as a view, but a real user will never be able to see such a tiny ad. The second type of online ad fraud involves deception. In a domain spoofing scam, for example, advertisers can be led to believe that their ads we're shown on a reputable publisher's website when in fact a fake website was used. Finally, the most common and hardest to detect online ad fraud is using illegal bots. A study in 2013 conducted by South Media showed that 59% of agency media buyers saw bad traffic negatively impacting campaign performance. In response 34% of online publishers surveyed said they would be implementing anti-bot solution in 2014 representing a 125% year over year increase. Based on the levels of bot traffic in that year, the global display advertising industry was estimated in 2014 to have wasted up to $11 billion advertising to bots. The biggest challenge in preventing ad fraud is the difficulty in systematically evaluating and monitoring the quality of inventory sources for online advertising. Particularly those that are sold on open ad-exchanges. Larger publishers, such as major news networks, would usually reserve a fair amount of premium inventory for direct buyers similar to buying traditional media. Those premium publishers are more likely to rely on a managed service buying model and less on placing inventory in an open exchange. These publishers have more safeguards in place and are less likely to attract high levels of fraud compared to lower level and lower tier publishers. In contrast, programmatic exchanges tend to contain a more mixed collection of impression opportunities, with both premium as well as non-premium inventories. Many of the smaller and non-premium publishers have less robust fraud control measures in place than their premium counterparts. Advertisers must decide based on their business and marketing goals whether to endure a certain loss to their advertising budgets by buying cheaper inventories or to spend more on the premium inventories. Fraud detection is an important first step. Marketers must comprehensively understand the nature and the scale of the problem through measurement and reporting. According to Integral Marketing Science, the best fraud mitigation strategy utilizes the following multi-faceted approach. One, direct publisher outreach to tactically address fraud. Two, engaging in strategic buying so advertisers prioritize inventory with low-fraud levels. Third, utilizing third-party blocking capabilities to ensure ads are not being served from known sources of fraud. And four, conducting pre-bid optimization that allows advertisers to avoid bidding on impressions sourced from fraudulent origins. Now, let's shift focus to look at brand safety and monitoring issues. Big headlines in 2017 on issues such as fake news, political bipolarization, and mass social movements have triggered a wave of intense advertiser concerns around the potentially detrimental brand impact of risky content. When ads are sold, bought, and displayed automatically across different digital channels, it has become incredibly difficult for advertisers to control the context in which an ad may be viewed. Although, targeted digital advertising is more effective than broadcast advertising. The risk of having your brand appearing next to inappropriate content is also high. For example, an airline ad being shown next to a breaking news story about an airplane crash. A restaurant ad showing before a story about food safety. Or a company's brand being displayed next to a terrorist propaganda video on YouTube, are all examples of how a brand can be tarnished easily in digital media. Brand safety must be a core consideration in a digital advertising campaign. Steps should be taken to monitor and quickly react to any potential threats. Public relations and crisis communication teams should be consulted in the early stages of a campaign planning and a remediation plan should be created in anticipation of potential risks. Another threat to brand image is social media. While social media users and online influencers can help drive a surge of positive attention to a brand, they can also generate waves of negative sentiment just as quickly and easily. Today, consumers are talking about companies' brands all the time. Online review sites, directories, social networking sites, Wikipedia, blogs, and forums all allow users to express their opinions about a brand, products, services, leaders, employment practices, and anything else related to it. The content can appear in so many places online that it is impossible to monitor this conversation by visiting each site and sifting through the billions of comments left by web users. Companies should frequently, if not constantly, monitor their brand's online presence so they can actively manage their reputations. Online reputation management, or ORM, is the act of reviewing what is being said about a company or individual online so the company or individual can engage in activities to improve their overall public perception. You can think of ORM, as public relations on the internet. As the company monitors for mentions of its brand online, it may come across content that reflects negatively on the brand, this content can surface in several different locations and the proper response to this negative content depends on the location. A few of the locations that are likely to have negative content about a brand include online review sites, such as Yelp and Zagat, Scam reporting sites, such as scam.com ripoffreport.com, in various online forums and press articles. Like in traditional PR media monitoring is essential in digital marketing. Fortunately, there are a variety of software tools that have been created to enable monitoring of what is being said about a company or brand in real time, no matter where these opinions are published online. These tools crawl the web looking for mentions of a brand to alert a company to any new content that has been posted. A quick search for social media monitoring tools will turn up hundreds of these available tools. Some tools monitor social media sites only whereas others crawl the entire Internet. Some services, such as Google Alert, are free to use, while others are more sophisticated and costly.
