What Is Brand Safety Anymore?
Influencer marketing has matured. But brand safety continues to trail behind.
Influencer Marketing has been a channel steeped in scandal from the very beginning. First, it was #ad and the absence of proper disclosure that sparked an abundance of FTC fines and warnings. More recently, one can’t walk away from a discussion about influencers without the word “fraud” being evoked. And all along the way we’ve witnessed a trail of influencer faux pas drop, at every level (micro to macro) and in every corner (Twitch to Instagram).
Nevertheless, influencers continue to generate returns for brands, and in turn the creator economy continues to scale. But in a business where so much can go wrong so fast, what does influencer brand safety look like these days?
A Moving Target
In post-pandemic America, consumers are holding brands more responsible for upholding values, both within their organizations and through the lens of their marketing initiatives. That includes creator selection.
In turn, brands are raising their expectations of the social platforms themselves — In terms of how they allocate their paid media dollars and what creators they partner with. They’re also leveraging vetting tools offered by third party influencer tools and marketplaces. Those vetting tools have their work cut out for them. Searching the last 1 or 2 years won’t suffice. Brands need to have an all-time historical audit of an influencers content in order to be sure no potentially damaging or inflammatory content is lurking in their feed.
In the wake of brands retaliating against companies like Facebook for not being responsive enough in fighting misinformation, we’ve seen some platforms proactively clean up their communities and hold their creators accountable for publishing positive work (take Pinterest’s newly introduced Creator Code, for example). This is designed to create a safer space for brands to invest their dollars and partner up.
But who should ultimately own this responsibility? Should it start with the platforms themselves cracking down, or is it on the brands to arm themselves with the tools they need (third party or otherwise) in order to properly assess their creators and any partnership risks?
Beyond the debate over responsibility, we’re seeing the very definition of “brand safe” continue to change. While hate and misinformation are objectively bad and will continue to draw red flags, talking about potentially polarizing topics like politics is something that more brands don’t mind. This wasn’t always the case. I remember a time where brands were scared of the word “activism.” Today, it’s something they’re coming to embrace, and that’s thanks in large part to vocal consumers themselves for pushing brands to take a public stand on the social issues currently dominating our culture.
Creating a Safe Space
Influencers aren’t the only ones prone to bad behavior. Brands themselves occasionally make blunders, and now we’re seeing a mutual sense of responsibility emerge from brand-influencer partnerships. It’s important for both sides to know one another before and during any engagement.
The key challenge here is scale. As brands ramp up their marketing initiatives and we see the introduction of trends like creator houses that exponentially grow the number of creators within a brand’s network or cast, it becomes harder to track individual behavior.
Couple the above with a generally crowded space and loads of partnership opportunities coming through the pipeline, and creators face a similar problem. We’ve seen brands and creators jointly come under fire for irresponsible marketing, like targeting underage kids with unhealthy food and beverages.
Without a doubt, brands can and should strengthen the morality clauses within their contracts. Those clauses could even introduce damages should someone severely damage the reputation of the brand (good luck getting a talent manager to agree to that). Perhaps even the idea of a “creator code” should be introduced, so the larger influencer community and core consumers are fully aware of the standards these brands are holding their influencers to.
It’s easy to rattle off a list of process fixes, but the reality is that we will always have these issues. I have always said that the beauty of influencer marketing is that it is human-driven. As long as we continue to tap creators there will be the occasional misstep or rule broken, though the severity may vary wildly. Instead, it’s the transparency of our expectations we can unquestionably improve on: To hold all parties accountable, inspiring creators and brand decision makers alike to live by the very values we market to consumers.