Negative Reach: BRAND SAFETY AND AD QUALITY IN AN ERA OF FAKE NEWS AND DISRUPTION

Welcome to the second report in our series “Imagine: Forces of Change.” In our first report, we focused on the expanded and redefined media landscape as one of five forces of change challenging marketers to reconsider the way media is defined, leveraged and orchestrated.

In this report, we focus on a second force of change that we and the Wharton Future of Advertising (WFoA) community emphasized in our recent book Beyond Advertising: the need for marketers to acknowledge, accept and proactively act on the fact that their brand communications do not exist in a vacuum. To be sure, advertising has always been part of the cultural zeitgeist, but it must now be moved more squarely into a brand’s planning and strategy functions due to the recent confluence of:

• Social media that quickly outs companies for both intentional or unintentional lack of cultural or social consciousness
• The growing call for companies to take a stand on relevant societal issues—and to back that stand with coherent business choices throughout the organization
• The backlash and potentially longlasting brand damage due to tonedeaf, inconsistent or irresponsible adjacency or timing of messaging, in many cases due to automated media placement
• Missed opportunities to make a connection between the role of products and services in people’s lives and their larger societal context

Read the full ebook here