Brand Safety at The Independent

The Independent treats sensitive content for our clients and partners as a top priority endeavouring to ensure that advertising is displayed in a brand safe environment across all our properties. The majority of the content on our premium titles The Independent and Indy100 will be safe for brands to display their inventory regardless of the category – for example our sport, lifestyle, culture and business channels.

However, as a news publisher, we are also committed to delivering the latest news to our audience and we are aware that the sensitive nature of some news content may not be a desirable environment for all advertisers.

We use a multi-stage process to make best efforts to ensure that clients and partners who buy directly from us (by IO or programmatically via PG/PMP) have their advertising displayed in an appropriate and brand safe environment.

1. 1. The first stage is controlled by the editorial team who can mark a story as sensitive content in our Content Management System that disables ad units on the page.

1. 2. We also work with two industry-accredited suppliers, IAS and Mantis to review and categorise content – this allows ads to be targeted away from particular articles or pages based on keywords, place names or subject matter. Our pages are tagged with IAS and Mantis keywords for negative keyword targeting which allows us to stop any campaign running on any content with these specific keywords. We have also worked with both partners to build variable thresholds. This will allow advertisers with the strictest parameters to run only on content they are comfortable with, while those with less sensitive requirements are able to loosen the threshold and run against more inventory at their discretion.

1. 3. As well as IAS, Mantis and our CMS system, we also use ‘Topic Tags.’ These are classified by our editorial team and allow us to positively or negatively target campaigns.

1. 4. Finally, our operations team are constantly monitoring campaigns and act as a final human check on the rare occasions when something gets through the measures outlined above.

The best way for advertisers to ensure that their campaigns run against appropriate content for their brand is to buy directly from us and brief us on brand safety requirements when making the booking. In the unlikely event that advertising appears in an inappropriate context we will aim to effect take down within 4 hours during business hours and 24 hours at other times. For any further queries on approach to brand safety please contact adops@esimedia.co.uk