Brand Safety Process

We put in place strict exclusions when running activity in the DSP we use. In line with industry best practice, we approach this in two ways using our brand safety partner – DoubleVerify.

  1. Pre-bid filtering to exclude impressions from our programmatic campaigns using bespoke content category filtering tools – allowing us to block any harmful sites or placements.
  2. Post-bid blocking to exclude impressions from our programmatic campaigns using bespoke content category filtering tools – allowing us to block any harmful sites or placements.

We also use Measurement and analytics tools for post-delivery insights into the quality of inventory.

Pre-bid Content Filtering

  • This is carried out through DSP content category exclusions, 3rd party content category exclusions, URL keyword & blocked sites.
  • Category exclusions are set as standard to exclude anything that is of ‘moderate and high risk’ – unless agreed otherwise with the client – which is the highest level it can be set at. These categories include Adult, Alcohol, Illegal Downloads, Drugs, hate Speech, Offensive Language, Violence, Unrateable & Suspicious. This is implemented through DoubleVerify – a 3rd party specialist technology that is integrated into the DSP and bought on a cost per thousand impressions basis.
  • We are also able to apply, depending on the DSP, bespoke brand suitability helping ensure the content we serve against is not only brand safe, but also brand suitable for each client.

 

Post-bid content blocking:

  • Based on the same category exclusion tech from DoubleVerify,  post-bid blocking acts as a failsafe to make sure all content is brand safe.
  • This is a piece of code within each creative which, as the ad is about to be shown on a website, allows us to double check the content and quality of the web page and blocks our creative from showing. We end up blocking a very small percentage here as our pre-bid security is so strong, but it is always best to have this option.

3rd Party Verification – Post-Delivery Insight

We use DoubleVerify to monitor the quality of online advertising, as well as viewability. These insights allow us to improve the quality and effectiveness of advertising, through the customisable category filtering which is bespoke to each client.

We look at ‘Viewability, ‘Fraud/SIVT, and ‘Brand Suitability’ by site. If any specific sites are seen as worse than the DoubleVerify benchmark, then we will actively exclude it from delivery. We then also use general principles to confirm whether a site is legitimate or not. These include checking the connection is secure, ensuring the URL contains ‘https’ at the start, checking /ads.txt on the site and whether the ads render correctly/click through correctly on site. Also, simply, whether the publisher is well known.

In general – we are moving away from blocklists which can become out-dated quickly. DoubleVerify bespoke segments update far quicker and should block any of the sites we would have on our lists. However, we will always employ blocklists for known sites we would never serve on, as well as domains that specific clients don’t align with.

We have determined benchmarks for each of the core metrics and filter out domains that fall below this benchmark.

  • Viewability % – below 20%
  • In View Time – below 5”
  • Fraud/SIVT – over 5%
  • Brand Safety/Suitability % – above 10% (with exceptions)