Searching for Safer Product

It wasn’t that long ago that when a distributor sat down to evaluate the competition, their research really only included other distributors. It didn’t include print media, direct mail, social media, or broadcast. Today, everything is different. Distributors are now in the battle for the client’s promotional budget along with other players, and it’s no longer just about battling with somebody who can undercut your price on a few dozen T-shirts. You’re in the game because you, and many others in the industry, have done a great job of explaining to end-users why promotional products deserve to be part of the overall ad budget discussion. Initiatives like last week’s PPAI Promotional Products Work! Week bring awareness of just how effective an advertising medium our industry is. All sorts of info is available to show end-user clients the power of promotion, the ROI it can deliver from a brand awareness standpoint, and how it compares favorably with other media choices.

Now that promotional products distributors have earned a spot at the table, it’s important to be ready to hold your own with the agencies when it comes to brand safety. Last month, an industry group, the American Association of Advertising Agencies (the Four A’s), announced a new initiative to “keep ads out of unsafe environments.” I’m sure brand safety is always front and center in your conversation with clients, but in these days where digital advertising spreads across the sprawling internet, the Four A’s are committed to driving awareness in their industry that a brand’s reputation can get hit hard if an ad appears in the wrong place. The program the Four A’s announced will include a process for flagging instances where a brand could potentially be damaged by adjacency to messaging that is not consistent with their corporate direction. The more conservative the brand, the less likely it is to take a chance on advertising where the editorial is too edgy for the brand direction and message.

How does that apply to distributors? That’s simple. Brands don’t want their message in the wrong place when it comes to promotional products, either. Whether a sourced product is potentially unsafe, or is manufactured irresponsibly, brands are at risk for a hit on their reputation if that comes to light as well. Up until recently, most of the search engines that distributors use to find products every day had no way to filter just for product safety. That’s beginning to change. The Quality Certification Alliance has announced a new “safety partnership” with ZOOMCatalog, giving access to the QCA-Accredited companies’ catalog information. (Disclosure: I once was the executive director of QCA, the only industry non-profit focused on product safety).

“There is a legitimate concern for challenges posed by ads that appear alongside material that may be considered offensive to some,” says Tim Brown, QCA executive director—operations. “While the focus on content placement is a legitimate concern for brands, it is not the only consideration marketers face. When viewed holistically, brand safety is about much more than content placement. It encompasses every aspect of a brand’s image.”

In “Brand Safety—More than Just Digital Media,” Brown says that marketers should be just as concerned with their brand safety offline, as they are online—meaning careful consideration for any promotional product that bears the brand and brand messaging. There are many search engines to choose from, and being accredited by QCA is also just one way to insure that a supplier you are sourcing with has a corporate culture focused on product safety. But this partnership looks like a good start to putting the information in the right spot.

One other thing to remember, QCA does NOT accredit individual products or factories, so there is no such thing as a “QCA-Accredited coffee mug.” Rather, QCA accredits suppliers that have documented they have the processes and procedures in place to detect and deter unsafe product before it gets into the hands of your client. But, QCA is not the only answer for every distributor and client’s needs. If you decide to go it alone, PPAI has some very client-friendly basic guidelines and questions on communicating about product safety that you can review with your client. Either way, the time to get in the battle for ad dollars is now.