Zefr x Brand Safety Summit London 2024 in Review:

Building a Blueprint for Global Responsible Marketing with Nestlé and GroupM

Last week the Zefr team was in London for the 614 Group’s annual Brand Safety Summit event to host a fireside chat: “Building a Blueprint for Global Responsible Marketing with Zefr, Nestle, and GroupM.” The panel was moderated by Zefr’s Chief Commercial Officer, Andrew Serby, and featured Natalia Louzada, Global Programmatic & Brand Safety Lead at Nestle alongside Alex Thomas, Head of Brand Safety & Quality, at GroupM UK & EMEA.

The conversation centered around how brands and agencies today are applying principles of brand and digital responsibility to their media strategies at a time when things like generative AI and the spread of misinformation are becoming increasingly complex challenges for marketers.

Opening up the discussion, Andrew Serby contextualized the current media landscape and issues by highlighting how misinformation is widespread around the world and varies market by market and across local topics, is impacting consumer sentiment, and is getting harder to discern between what is considered real vs. fake.

• 85% of people in the UK are worried about online disinformation (The Guardian)
• 45% of people were unsure if a piece of misinformation content was fake (MAGNA Media Trials & Zefr)

As the ubiquity of generative AI tools and models only continue to improve in their ability to create convincing deep fake image, audio, and video content, it will only become more challenging for marketers and consumers to determine authenticity. In order to help detect, track trends, and combat the spread of false content, Zefr has invested in misinformation technology that leverages and integrates fact checks as the source of truth from IFCN-certified fact-checking organizations around the world.

Zefr showcased a newly developed fact-checking database that is open source and makes essential fact-checks from IFCN-certified fact checking organizations accessible for advertisers through one simple, consolidated interface. These tools will be essential for navigating emerging challenges across the digital media landscape and will support the significant efforts and investment led by the platforms into resolving this ever-evolving issue, especially in a year where more than 50 countries will go through elections globally.

The conversation then shifted towards the topic of brand and agency purpose, and how today’s marketers are scaling their brand purpose across everything they do in this new era of marketing.

Below is a round-up of key soundbites from the panelists covering pertinent issues, such as the importance of proactivity vs. reactivity, implementing the right technologies, and applying brand values and principles across everything marketers work on.

On Nestle’s Digital Responsibility Practice and how they view brand safety and suitability management:

Louzada: “Brand safety we cannot have a document that we’re only going to look at every month or every three months or every year. Things are happening everyday, and so it needs to be a live document. And this is the challenge, because we have a huge team and all the markets, and things happening in each market, so we need to have our head everywhere.”

Louzada: “[Brand Responsibility] is an essential topic. It’s not only about preventing things or looking after your brand reputation, it’s more — it’s a foundation for the relationship with your consumer.”

GroupM’s Responsible Investment Framework and how each pillar is essential and works together, and the need for proactive planning:

Thomas: “We look at it from a Brand Safety & Suitability point of view, Sustainability, DE&I, Responsible Journalism, and Data Ethics.

For us what is really important is that — while that was born out of the brand safety practice — of those different areas can’t be looked at in isolation. For example, something that you might do to your brand safety settings could or would have an impact on reaching DE&I audiences or funding news.”

Thomas: “Defining that suitability strategy up front, makes it much easier then to be ready for any emerging challenges that might happen — rather than brand safety necessarily being something that is always reactive, which I think it has been in the past.”

On the need to use and vet new technologies to address emerging brand safety issues today:

Thomas: “The principles are the same when it comes to brand safety, which are transparency, control, and measurement — but that looks different in different environments.

Whether you’re in live streaming or whether you’re in a social platform or programmatic, wherever that might be, there are really important nuances that need to be made, and the devil is in the details. It really is important to understand exactly what is doable in what environments and how that translates from your brand values to the actual tactics and media you’re running across and how those two things work together.”

Louzada: “The technology is so important. We need to have the principle that we have within Nestle, we need to have good partners and the industry working along with us, and we need to have the right technology.”

The importance of supporting journalistic and news environments with media as part of a brand suitability strategy:

Thomas: “It’s not a question of safety it’s a question of suitability when it comes to news environments…it’s whether it’s suitable for that particular brand. We know how important those new partners and credible, fact-based information is at anytime — but particularly at a time like this — and it’s important that we do what we can for them to be supported.

But equally, it goes beyond that–-it’s not just a case of supporting those partners, because those partners are where people go to get their information it’s where users are, and they’re really high-performing audiences, so it goes beyond just the responsibility and into the performance side as well.”