Brand Safety Is Not Driving Media Allocation Decisions in 2018/19

In moving from a method of stated importance to derived importance, research conducted by MediaVillage uncovered a surprising disconnect between perception and reality.  Last May, MediaVillage asked 747 advertiser and agency executives to rate the relevance of nine criteria to their media planning and buying decision-making processes.  Nearly 70% said brand-safe environment was very relevant, so it ranked first in relevance ahead of valuable targeted audience demos, research insights and a responsive and knowledgeable sales team.  But in late 2017, based on responses from 775 advertiser and agency executives, MediaVillage conducted linear regression analyses for 53 media companies in order to determine which of 11 criteria were most likely to drive likelihood to increase spend with each organization.  According to these results, brand-safe environment is only 4% likely to strongly correlate with a respondent's intention to spend.  "Effective sales organization," "Advanced data and analytics" and "Quality of audience demos justifies premium pricing" are most likely to relate to increasing respondents' propensity to increase their investments in 2018.  Vice and Meredith are two publishers for which "brand-safe environment" registered as a key driver of intent to increase spend.