How is contextual brand safety different from privacy safety?

While the term “privacy safe” has become a bit of a buzzword, at Sourcepoint we define it as the desired outcome of due diligence.

There’s no such thing as privacy-safe technology in and of itself.

In digital advertising, due diligence includes making sure that your advertisements only appear on websites with high levels of privacy compliance.

Privacy safety should be the first filter you apply to your media buys, an always-on segment that makes sure you’re avoiding the riskiest inventory. Then additional media quality filters can be applied, such as brand safety.

Contextual brand safety is a good analogy for privacy safety because the degree of privacy compliance of a website is a leading indicator of the overall quality of a website. However, consumer data leakage on low-quality website can damage your brand’s reputation as well as expose your brand to legal risk. In Europe, and potentially under California law, if your targeting combines first-party data with third-party data, you are liable for the privacy compliance of a publisher’s website. 

What’s the difference between viewability and privacy safety?

Viewability is a metric that tells you what percentage of your inventory was shown on a website.

With privacy-safety data, we’re looking at the observable privacy compliance artifacts of a website to determine level of risk. 

High-risk websites are very often poor-quality inventory that should probably be removed from your buys anyway. In the rare cases that a premium media partner is not meeting certain privacy quality metrics, your brand has visibility and can reach out to ask them to remediate the issue.

How can I activate Sourcepoint’s privacy-safe inventory segments?

A privacy safety strategy can ensure that your brand appears only in clean, well-lit environments. We offer first-to-market segments that can be applied to exclude only the highest risk inventory or overlay low-risk/high-quality inventory when building audience segments.

Privacy-safe inventory segments for the US and Europe are available today on Xandr Curate. You can also purchase directly on The Trade Desk or DV360 with a deal ID. Share this one-pager with your agency account team to get started.