Oh boy, am I getting my teeth into some juicy topics this month. Cutting through the BS when it comes to brand safety and tapping into the top 2025 trends are on the agenda as I rifle through my inbox to address your most pressing digital dilemmas.
As IAB UK’s chief digital cheerleader, it’s all in a day’s work for me and central to my mission to help advertisers rediscover the joy of digital. So without further ado…
Q: I’ve been hearing a lot about brand safety recently and I want to know what I should be doing to keep my brand safe online without inadvertently hurting professional publishers. Can you help?
This is one complex issue and I’m on a word count, so let’s start with a couple of things to keep in mind when we talk about brand safety…
1) When people say “brand safety”, they tend to lump safety and suitability together. Here’s my basic explainer. Brand unsafe = no ads should appear in the environment. Period. Brand unsuitable = it’s not right for your brand but would be for someone else's.
2) Your brand safety strategy shouldn’t only be focused on the environments you want to avoid. It should also take into account the publishers that do align with your brand values that you proactively want to support. The word “safety” gets us in a defensive state of mind, but this is just as much about understanding how to embrace the right environments for you, as well as the ones to avoid.
So how do you do that? Start by getting informed with our brand safety Q&A and acquainted with the IAB Gold Standard, which includes steps to support brand safety and improve transparency around where ads are appearing.
A smart, contextually considerate approach is the best way forward - utilising the technology and tools that are available to understand environments and working with trusted partners to ensure that inclusion lists aren’t being used as a catch-all solution.
Rest assured that you’re not the only one who is unsure of how to go about this in a proportionate, risk-based and responsible way, and that there are lots of resources, tools and techniques that can help.
Q: Hi Joy - it’s getting to that time of year when everyone is talking about trends. What do you think will define advertising in 2025?
In the ultimate question dodge, I’m going to point you in the direction of The IAB UK Podcast, where people a lot more qualified than me share a lot of very smart thoughts about what to expect in 2025.
By that, I mean Mindshare’s Sophia Harding, Spark Foundry’s William McMahon, and AKA’s Emily Hart. There’s loads to get your teeth, into including the growth of retail media (the UK market is set to break the £1bn mark in 2025, don’cha know), creating content for wearable devices, scaling immersive experiences, and why 2025 will hopefully be the year we move into taking a true omnichannel approach across media.
And, of course, a strong contender for the most hyped technology of all time: Generative AI. Harding nailed it on this one: “I don’t think we over-hyped it all… what has changed is that in last year’s trend report we had Gen AI as a trend in itself. What we’re seeing now is that we’re weaving it into most of our other trends. There is more of a focus on the software and applications of Gen AI.” So, from the shape of search to the effectiveness of virtual assistants, AI isn’t going anywhere - but expect less talk about Gen AI itself and more of a focus on how to practically embed it into how we work in 2025.
On that note, make sure you check out NORI - IAB UK’s new virtual assistant located in the bottom right-hand corner of our website - ready to answer all your digital ad queries!