If it’s not safe from hackers, it’s not safe for your brand

In the world of media, there is a duality in how audiences perceive certain channels. More than a decade ago, social media was such an exciting new channel for marketers because it had everything: seemingly infinite scale, targeting based on mountains of user data, and platforms that supported engaging ad experiences.

What’s more, advertisers could tap into the swathes of new “social media influencers” and layer on another level of marketing juice: Word of mouth. And the prices show it:

• Sponsored posts on Instagram are now 44% more expensive than in 2018.
• A Facebook status costs $395 in 2019, up from $8 in 2014.
• Twitter status updates rose 14.6x from $29 in 2014 to $422 this year.
• YouTube sponsored posts have shot up from $420 in 2014 to a $6,700 in 2019.

Is a paid endorsement on YouTube really worth 16 times what it cost five years ago?

The explosion of UGC

While sponsored posts are not cheap, YouTube’s regular inventory is affordable, averaging $0.10 to 0.30 per video view. Even with Netflix’s meteoric rise and now #1 status, US adults spend 23 minutes a day on YouTube, and mobile video views number over one billion a day, with 500 new hours of content being uploaded each minute!

While that sounds extremely exciting a marketer that sees opportunity in every hour of new video, to someone with a more cautious mindset, seeing all that rogue content going up without any sort of editorial review is terrifying. It means that even with all of the algorithms in the world, there’s no way that YouTube can truly govern their own territory. The term “Wild West” is often overused in ad tech, but if there was ever a time to use it, this would be it.

No one is “safe”

You don’t even need to be the cautious type to fear YouTube. By now, it’s safe to say that nearly anyone who has either had brand clients or worked for a brand has lived through a brand-safety crisis due to user-generated content (UGC).

It used to be that these incidents happened by accident; that is, an inappropriate channel somehow slipped through the cracks and landed on someone’s whitelist, or an influencer that you were associated with did something that caused them to fall from grace with their followers, the mass media, or both.

A new threat

Today we have a new level of danger in the UGC world – hackers. In a recent wave of incidents, hackers used traditional phishing scams to direct owners of popular YouTube channels to fake URLs and getting them to submit login credentials, which then allows hackers to take over their channels.

Or, in the case of MarcoStyle, a gaming influencer with 350,000 subscribers, it was an email looking to advertise on his channel, with a link that when he clicked on it, an installer buried itself on his computer, got into his Google account and extracted his YouTube account.

The creator of the popular Warhammer 40k fan film “Astartes” also reported a similar hacking that took months for YouTube to resolve.

It’s not just happening to gamers. Multiple channel owners in the auto-tuning (car mods, not vocal distortion!) and car review community have reported the same issue.

Damage control

By “reporting,” I don’t mean just posting in community forums or on Twitter about their experience. All of these YouTube influencers nearly immediately reported the issue to YouTube, and all received similar responses:

“We take account security very seriously and regularly notify users when we detect suspicious activity. We encourage users to enable two-factor authentication as part of Google’s account Security Checkup, which decreases the risk of hacking. If a user has reason to believe their account was compromised, they can notify our team to secure the account and regain control.”

In most of these cases, the channel owner regained control of their account… eventually. But in the meantime, hackers were stealing thousands of dollars from advertisers and had 100% control over the content being posted.

If you were a marketer who was leveraging those channels to reach your niche audience (e.g., car enthusiasts, miniature war-gamers), your ads were appearing next to something over which you had no control.

Choose certainty

So, if you’re a brand relying on YouTube influencers or YouTube ads, what you think might be brand-safe might no longer be anything of the sort.

Whether you have a fear-based outlook or an opportunity-based POV, you can’t argue with facts on the ground.

When your supply partner can’t tell you exactly where your ads appear – or if they have 100% control over those environments – you can’t feel 100% secure that your brand is safe. Why would you risk it?

Choose channels that provide the same level of contextual targeting but that allow you to sleep soundly at night, without the fear of being woken up to a crisis.

Gabriella is an advertising professional with extensive knowledge in the mobile ad-tech industry. In her role at AdColony, Gabriella explores and manages prospective and current partnerships with third-party data, measurement, and verification partners to further enhance AdColony’s strategy and offerings. She also works with internal marketing & sales teams to develop new go-to-market strategies and tactical sales materials to drive revenue across the brand programmatic and managed service business.