🔍 Microsoft Advertising Network's added brand safety layer

Sep 29, 2020

Good morning Search Marketer, brand safety is top of mind.

And more so as we head into election season here in the U.S. Microsoft Advertising has always stressed the brand safe nature of its Audience Network, which includes Microsoft-owned and operated sites plus a network of publisher sites. Now, it's going a step further with a partnership with the audience verification firm Integral Ad Science (IAS).

Any pages that are deemed to be of moderate or high brand risk will be excluded automatically from Audience Network ad inventory. It's applied automatically and advertisers don't have to take any action. This will likely have some impact on scale, but gives Microsoft a point of differentiation over Facebook, Google and other programmatic ad sellers.

Native ads on the Microsoft Audience Network can be targeted using data from the Microsoft Audience graph, including LinkedIn data.

Keep reading for more on TikTok, Google's very bad meme problem and more.

Ginny Marvin,
Editor-In-Chief

How to adapt and become a purpose-driven company

There is a new normal now, and a business should be a force for good. But if you are rethinking your business strategy to live up to that expectation, how do you get started?

According to Afdhel Aziz, author of Good is the New Cool, start with the "five Cs."

Understand your Customers
Look at the Competition
Find strong Collaborators
Identify your Challenges
Establish your Culture

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Social Shorts

TikTok downloads can continue. For now.

A U.S. judge blocked the Trump administration's order for Apple and Google to start banning TikTok from their app stores Sunday. Parent company ByteDance is still in talks with Walmart and Oracle to take ownership stakes in a new entity that would be called TikTok Global and oversee the U.S. operations.

Why we care. TikTok's political headaches may actually be helping keep it at the top of the app download charts — it was in fourth place among free apps in the Apple App store Sunday and yesterday. Yet, the uncertainty of the app's fate has made it hard for advertisers to bank on it for Q4 holiday campaigns and its younger user base can be targeted elsewhere such as Snapchat. Facebook's TikTok answer, Instagram Reels, is also aiming to pick up budgets previously destined for TikTok.

A pivot with a purpose

"Like every brand, we made incredible adjustments in real-time. Programs were cut, programs were pushed, programs were moved to next year," said Heidi Cooley, head of global marketing at Crocs.

But amidst that disruption the company made purpose a priority and launched an initiative to outfit front-line healthcare workers who needed their footwear.

"A global team initiated a commitment around giving tens of thousands of pairs a day to healthcare heroes, and we gave away over 45 days 860,000 pairs of crocs valued at over $40 million."

Learn more. Check out "The Download", brought to you by Microsoft Advertising.

Search Shorts

Hateful memes showing in Google results

Anti-semitic memes in Google. Google apologized for hateful aniti-semitic memes for "jewish baby strollers" appearing in search results, citing "data voids": "It's not likely a topic normally searched for, nor an actual product that's marketed. There's a 'void' of good content to surface that matches what was asked for." Users have found other offensive examples. The memes were still showing in Image search results as of yesterday, and exacerbated by articles written about the problem. "In cases like this, where we don't have [a] policy that covers removal, we work to see if there are ways to surface more helpful content…," said Google's search liaison Danny Sullivan as part of the response. But we'll note, Google's not the only one: Bing and DuckDuckGo also have these memes.

Canonical URL Google bug. This is not confirmed but there may have been a weird Google search bug with canonical URLs, which may explain the ranking fluctuations we saw last week.

Google turned 22 years old. Sunday, Google turned 22 years old, and to celebrate the letters in the Google logo, it had a video conference birthday party. Check it out here.

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