CDP Institute

Covid may have changed some things, but consumers worldwide are as cynical about brands as ever, according to the latest Havas Meaningful Brands report.  Fewer than half (47%) see brands as trustworthy and 71% doubt brands will deliver on their promises.  Despite this pessimism, 73% of consumers believe that brands should act for the good of society and 53% say they’d pay more for a brand that takes a stand.

One way that brands show they’re responsible is by not advertising near inappropriate content.  Ad quality platform Pixalate recently launched a Publisher Trust Index that reports on quality metrics including brand safety, fraudulent traffic, viewability, and other factors for top 100 mobile and connected TV apps.  The ratings are based on proprietary algorithms, so they must be right.

If you’re looking for a broader measure of brand perceptions, BlueOcean analyzes data from hundreds of sources including social media, forums, review sites, and financial reports to understand consumer attitudes towards brands.  They’ve just announced they’ll release an API later this year that will let third party applications access this data.

Have we mentioned recently that it’s helpful to unify customer data?  The folks at Qualified just raised a $51 million Series B to do that, specifically in the form of identifying Web site visitors, finding internal and third party data about them, and then using it to help chat agents, sales reps, and others.  Their system only works with the Salesforce Sales cloud.

Signs and other “out of home” media are probably the oldest form of advertising, so there’s something faintly amusing about buying them with programmatic technology and using mobile devices to track the results.  Or not.  Either way, you might like to know that Verizon Media has just launched full-funnel self-service product suite so you can plan, buy, measure, and optimize your digital out of home ads in the most modern ways possible.

Shoppable ads are a hot topic right now.  But The Harris Poll finds just 36% of consumers said they’d actually buy something directly from an in-show ad, perhaps because nearly 80% do other things while ads are being shown.  More might engage if they were rewarded with a discount or subsequent ad-free viewing.