Ask the Expert: What’s Happening with Brand Safety on News Sites?

‘Ask the Expert’ is a series that breaks down the tools, tech, and trends you’ve been hearing about in the trade pubs and around the office. We ask our in-house experts the tough questions and write up the answers in bite-sized pieces for your reading pleasure.

This month’s topic? Brand safety on news and information sites. We brought in a partner—Connatix’s chief revenue officer, Jenn Chen, to give us the breakdown.

Why is brand safety a topic of interest when it comes to serving ads on news outlets?

News sits at the heart of knowledge and information—especially now when consumers are spending more time online than ever before for the latest updates. News sits in a unique and critical place between the public and advertisers, whose allocated budgets help front-line journalists. While advertisers know they need news inventory to reach most of their consumers, they also have to protect and promote their brand in a positive way. Brand safety is an essential criterion to allow them to accomplish objectives, without sacrificing core advertising principals.

How can advertisers assess brand safety levels on video news content?

Today, there are very few solutions that allow advertisers to target the context of both page-level and video content. Advertisers usually layer on a pre-bid page-level solution such as Peer39, Oracle Grapeshot, Integral Ad Science, DoubleVerify, Moat, or a DSP’s built-in solutions for targeting. However, page-level solutions are not without limitations—they require advertisers to spend additional time and resources on reaching out to individual publishers and asking them to include first-party data on the backend to categorize video private marketplaces (PMPs). Ultimately, advertisers should consider solutions that can add another layer of insight with in-video context in order to target efficiently and safely.

How are news publishers properly classifying their content to fit their advertisers’ safety requirements?

Traditionally, publishers and their editorial teams manually classify content by grouping them into feeds, adding keyword tags, and also using their own technology solutions to decode transcripts and audio files into first-party categorizations. Video indexing tools help publishers use content contextualization to analyze the content on-site and, in their videos automatically, to complete an otherwise manual process.

How is Connatix solving problems with video content classification?

With our goal of creating engaging video experiences for readers, Connatix has developed technology that classifies and contextualizes videos by sentiment, content category, keywords, and famous individuals to help both publishers and advertisers scale in-video buying in a brand-safe way.

How does Connatix work with advertisers, DSPs, and publishers?

One of our goals at Connatix is to bridge the gap between publishers and advertisers. We build our platforms and tech to streamline processes and deliver effective video experiences across the board. For advertisers and DSP partners, Connatix helps curate our direct-to-publisher supply, optimizing towards goals alongside the brand’s DSP partner. Connatix offers the most efficient way to contextually target and access unique video supply activated inside our players. For strategic partners, we also create custom creative and data solutions with both parties to drive video performance. For publishers, Connatix offers a full-stack video solution: video player, CMS, ad server, and SSP/exchange. We work with over 500+ publishers, helping them improve their content strategy and creation as well as advertising monetization.

Are you interested in learning how Centro can boost your video advertising with brand safety? Learn more about our video advertising capabilities.