Brand safety debate: why reach requires risk

Confidence in your brand, and yourselves, allows you to be bold and therefore to maximise reach and avoid getting stifled by fears about brand safety.

That was the view of Laura Jenkins, head of brand partnerships at BBC Studios, during an innovative debate session at Campaign’s Media360 in Brighton. Jenkins was part of a three-person team of marketers arguing against the premise that expanding reach comes at the cost of trust and brand safety. 

During the forum, engagingly moderated by Debate Mate, Jenkins and her colleagues were opposed by three peers arguing the case that brand safety trumps everything, essentially following the Warren Buffett mantra that it takes 20 years to build a brand reputation but five minutes to ruin it.

Bluey: sky’s the limit

Jenkins cited the example of Bluey, the much-loved animated dog from down under, as a huge global brand that simply has to be allowed to flourish organically. “It’s very easy to get hung up on metrics and numbers,” she said, “but if your audience is billions of people, then your reach needs to be billions as well. If you know your brand, you know who you are, and you can be bold.

“With Bluey we have around 15 billion video views under our belt at this point on YouTube and we’re in 65 countries. Anything that comes from Bluey is authentic to the brand. It’s important that you have a guardian or, in our case, a guardian team, but essentially we see reach as a by-product of finding the right audience. 

“As long as you’re clear on your brand story, clear on where you want to show up and who you are then the sky's the limit.” 

This brand can: be willing to lose control

In relay parlance, Jenkins ran the anchor leg for her team, following Kate Dale, director of marketing at Sport England, and Tom Rabin, strategy director at Poppins Agency.

Dale likened an obsession with brand safety to keeping great art hidden from view. “Let’s be clear, brands are not museum pieces,” she said. “They don’t belong locked in climate-controlled rooms, protected from interpretation. Brands only live where they connect with people in the wild on their terms. It’s like keeping a masterpiece in the attic – technically it’s safe, but it’s also useless.”

Dale acknowledged that, as a publicly funded body, Sport England theoretically “could not be more risk averse” yet the success of the ‘This Girl Can’ campaign, which has been running since 2015, suggested otherwise. 

“We would not have got millions of women more active if we hadn’t taken risks – reach requires risks,” she said. “If you want to connect across conversations, cultures and platforms, you have to let go of total control and sometimes that can lead to unexpected results.”

Dale told a story of receiving a photo of someone’s tattoo of the ‘This Girl Can’ branding. The tattoo breached almost every brand guideline but Dale insisted: “It was a win. Yes, it was a failure of brand safety but we had reached the holy grail of branding: emotional ownership.”

Audience: understand where they are

Rabin said that brand safety restricts reach. “Audiences are essentially minimised,” he said. “We’re exposed to thousands of ads every day but we only remember about 12 of them. So it’s very difficult for brands to be memorised and recognised. We should start thinking about brands not from a safety perspective, but from the point of consolidating messages and understanding the audience and understanding where they hang out.”

Safety first: the case for the defence

Peter Rowe, head of media at NatWest Group, had kicked off the debate, proposing the motion that reach comes at a cost. “I stand for quality, I stand for trust, I stand for effectiveness,” he said. “Blindly following reach comes at a cost. It puts you at risk. It puts your brand trust at risk. It does you and this whole industry a disservice.”

Carl Kisseih, senior enterprise sales director at Double Verify, talked about reputational risk for brands: "Unprotected reach doesn't build brands, it breaks them."

Lydia Amoah, CEO of Backlight and founder of The Black Pound Report, said: “Brand safety is imperative. Some people say it comes as a cost, but it’s an investment if you want to reach audiences and you want to show up in the right places. Not having safety is the biggest risk that you could ever take.”

And in the unscientific survey of audience appreciation, Team Brand Safety was declared the winner of this thought-provoking debate.