Working with creators to promote a brand and engage audiences requires trust. Creators are people, which is part of why their content works so well – but people are unpredictable, and creator partnerships can be a little risky. This is the crux of the brand safety conversation in creator marketing.
After all, opening brand messaging up to hundreds or even thousands of creators relinquishes some of a brand’s creative control. Even tightly-briefed content lives alongside unsponsored content, and audiences consume them at the same time. Creators who may be brand suitable today may become a liability tomorrow.
Creators are not perfectly brand safe. And that’s kind of the whole point!
Consider the following: Electrolit – an electrolyte recovery drink – engages with and reposts content on TikTok that shows creators drinking their product before, during, and after alcohol to prevent or cure hangovers.
Creators posting about Electrolit
For most electrolyte drinks, endorsing content that shows its products alongside alcohol (or as a hangover remedy) isn’t brand suitable – despite how it might actually be consumed. Gatorade doesn’t lean into hangover cures, likely because this doesn’t fit alongside a brand image rooted in sports achievement and healthy lifestyle. Pedialyte doesn’t mention recovery from drinking alcohol anywhere as it is often positioned as a drink for kids.
Similarly, Electrolit doesn’t mention hangover recovery on their packaging, their website, or on their branded socials – but they do embrace this (slightly risky) narrative with creators, because creator marketing is a channel where this ‘realer’ message can flourish.
Electrolit embraces how social media users really experience their brand, which creates more genuine interactions with audiences on TikTok… and probably creates sales.
It’s authentic. It’s not necessarily safe, but it is brand suitable.
So what does ‘suitable’ mean for your brand? The nuance between brand safe and brand suitable is complex. In some cases, content might be objectively 'brand unsafe,' but still suitable. And in other other cases, content might be totally innocuous, but unsuitable for a brand. It is up to the brand to determine the line in the sand.
When vetting creators, marketers need to consider the Seven Cs of Brand Safety:
- A creator’s content across different modalities (text, visual, audio)
- The context in which that content was created: cultural, political, historical, etc.
- The characteristics of the creator themselves
- A creator’s history of controversies, both on and off social
- A creator’s typical community (who actually views their content?)
- A brand’s own customers and their social media consumption habits
- A creator’s history of brand engagements – including with competitors
With a 360° view of a creator, a brand marketer or agency can make a determination – how tolerable are this creator’s issues to our brand? And, even if a creator is tolerable, are they compliant? Say you are an alcohol brand in the USA. Do they respect FTC ad disclosure standards? Is their audience likely to be LDA compliant?
Savvy marketing leaders understand that risk is sometimes a currency to be spent. Often, introducing risk into creator marketing is part of what makes content authentic, and authenticity is the key to why creator marketing works. It is one of the ways that creator marketing is not programmatic.
Too much creative oversight and too much curatorial vetting eliminate the distinction between brand messaging and creator authenticity. Too much control misses the entire point. You want to find that sweet spot when working with creators – the balance between unacceptable risk and risk tolerance.
Some brands relish in controversy – they may even create it! And there is no shortage of suitable creators with which they can work. Other brands avoid any hint of risk, and it takes way more resources to vet and activate creators.
Because of this, creator marketers are often the ones pitching disruptive creator marketing concepts to their colleagues. A good story tied to risk tolerance can go a long way when selling risk versus big reward.
Where does technology fit into brand safety evaluation?
Brand safety demands both human judgment and technology to get right. While creator marketing platforms add depth and dimensionality to creator data, human POV remains essential to navigating culture and brand-specific considerations.
The best brand safety tech solutions are those that give marketers the tools and visibility they need to do their jobs well, rather than attempt to do their jobs for them.
Good creator marketing platforms level up the brand safety evaluation process. They can analyze creators' content, audiences, brand engagements, and social history at scale. AI and machine learning models can capture brand mentions, calculate audience demographics, and detect potential follower fraud.
That all said, even the most sophisticated technology can't yet factor in off-social contexts like internet trends, current events, or political climate. It can't incorporate brand-specific elements like traditional advertising history, guidelines, or tone. Most importantly, it lacks understanding of how these factors matter differently for each brand, campaign, or moment in time. Human perspective is crucial.
We believe AI should flag potential instances of concern to brands for review, but stop short of assigning a facile brand safety score without human input. Of course, AI and machine learning will help flag more nuanced, more contextual instances of brand-unsafe issues at scale. But brand safety is simply too important, too complex, and too nuanced to rely on a blanket score.
Some creator marketing platforms are launching simplified AI safety scores for creators. But abstracting brand safety to a one-size-fits-all grade (like A to F) actually opens your brand up to risk. Imagine that a creator learns they were passed up on a deal because your creator marketing platform gave them a big fat F grade. Imagine that that grade was based on political or cultural sensitivities. What would backlash from this look like?
At CreatorIQ, we’re building next-gen AI that will surface insights about content previously thought impossible. We’re investing in multi-modal capabilities for deeper coverage of the content and communications reviewed. And we are working to assign flags in the context of language and culture.
Modern marketing should be a symphony of humans and technology working together. Use tech to find creators. Leverage AI to fully understand creators and their content. And then, rely on a human to make final decisions in the context of their world, brand, and culture.