It’s been six months since RTÉ launched Ad Sentry, its brand safety solution. To those who have witnessed Ad Sentry in action I thought I’d check in to show what have we achieved so far. To date we have blocked almost 325 million ad impressions from being generated on our site. Ad impressions that normally would have delivered brand messages alongside potentially upsetting or harrowing articles. Ad Sentry is working - it is proactive rather than reactionary. We don’t wait for a brand or a client to send us their block list, we block all advertisers from appearing around content that may not be deemed suitable with their brand message. We no longer wait for a tragic news story to break for us to react, Ad Sentry has every basis covered.

For those of you new to this solution, please find previous article here.

So what has the rest of the industry being doing to tackle Brand Safety?

While Ad Sentry is proactive, the rest of the market still seems to be playing the reactionary game. There is a culture of waiting for something bad to happen until it is acknowledged and then clients pull spend around said bad content. On February 17^th 2019, blogger Matt Watson posted a 20-minute video highlighting how YouTube videos featuring children included inappropriate comments that linked to pornography. Three days later, big brands like McDonald's, AT&T and Nestlé had pulled or paused their ad spend with YouTube. YouTube have since taken some steps to tackle brand safety but with the volume of content they are dealing with on their platform, there will always be a challenge in which they are playing catchup. YouTube have recently shut down 400 channels and removed comments on tens of millions of videos and have outlined plans for comment-moderation software that allows creators to control comments. This needs to be enforced.

Over at Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg promised to increase his staff who work on safety to 30,000. That’s a huge number…but it’s still a needle in a haystack when they must patrol Facebook’s 2.27 billion monthly active users. Those 30,000 safety contractors equate to approximately one moderator for every 75,660 users…best of luck with that. This mismatch of content volume versus moderators doesn’t appear to be affecting its revenue, Core’s very comprehensive 2019 Outlook stated that:

“Despite all the issues surrounding Facebook last year, it will continue to increase its share of the online display market from 44% to 49%, with revenue totaling €108 million. This is driven by an estimated 30% growth in video revenue at Facebook this year. It is important to note that the consequence of Facebook’s growth is a smaller online display market for Irish publishers; we estimate that the remaining display market in 2019 will fall by 5.1% to €89.3 million.”

I find it difficult to marry those two paragraphs together. Brand safety is uncontrollable on Facebook, yet share of online market grows by 5%.