In-housing programmatic has been among the top priorities for many brands over the past 12 months, and the trend is still quietly gaining traction.

Forrester has predicted that in 2020, a third of in-house agencies will include media operations that control large amounts of their paid media budget. Why do it? For the savings; for transparency and peace of mind in a time of dwindling client-agency trust; for the sake of data control and integration of marketing and advertising.

Many of the challenges of going in-house are widely known - building the team, the platform, the strategy, the data governance. But we need to add another less-mentioned deal-breaker that all brands should bear in mind: the challenge of advertising safely online. We’ll break down what in-housers need, in three steps:

1. A dynamic list of IP-infringing, age-inappropriate and sexually explicit websites and publishers. This is to filter inventory and keep ads away from risky websites. Note the ‘dynamic’ part. Static lists won’t help, because these guys move around constantly to intercept your ad budgets.
   
2. A post-bid monitoring solution. See where ads landed and establish which partner, affiliate or agent was responsible.
3. Complementary brand safety tools for ad partners. Most brands aren’t going to be fully in-house. They need their partners to be taking the same precautions that they are.

These are major issues for brands taking digital advertising in-house. When advertising goes astray, it can fund crime, tarnish a brand, even bring the police to the door. Linguistic brand-safety tools aren’t enough to keep you safe. Talk to White Bullet about how to build online defences that really work.