Supply Side Platform | Comprehensive Brand Safety Drives Performance Metrics
zveloCAT Delivers Comprehensive Brand Safety and Drives Higher CTR and Brand Lift for Leading Supply Side Platform
Client Profile
zvelo’s client, a leader in the ad tech industry as a native Supply Side Platform (SSP), is the top choice in native buying platforms for more than 90% of the world’s top 50 mega-brands. The company works with the world’s largest marketers and trading desks to serve native ads into the feeds of leading publishers across the globe, powering billions of monthly ad impressions.
The SSP Business Challenge
As an internationally recognized ad tech platform working with some of the world’s most well-known mega brands, the client has been focused on utilizing content classification to improve brand safety for its inventory in order to drive increased click-through rate (CTR and) brand lift, two key measurements for success. The ability to segment the premium and long-tail inventory for brand safety is critical to maximizing return for its publishers and protecting the reputation of buyers and brands.
The changing ad tech landscape – from GDPR and other privacy regulations, to increasing encryption and a foreseeable demise to cookie-based behavioral targeting – was threatening the company’s long-standing reputation for delivering best-in-class brand safety through its meticulously curated, high-quality ad inventory. And so began the company’s search for a solution which could help them adapt to both regulatory and technological changes while consistently delivering premium brand safety and top quality ad inventory to their client base.
Prior to reaching out to any vendors, the company leadership laid out a comprehensive platform growth strategy which ultimately drove the key technology requirements for a solution.
IAB Classification Taxonomy
Among the most basic requirements was the need to have IAB Tier 1 and IAB Tier 2 classifications. Adding a layer of complexity, the company needed to have the flexibility to map the native IAB classifications to multiple, customizable categories for different clients. These customizations were crucial to manage the variances in what may constitute ‘objectionable’ or ‘brand safe’ from one culture to the next across the globe.
Accuracy/Coverage
As a top tier platform, finding a solution with the highest possible degree of accuracy and coverage was a high priority. This also included a requirement to support multiple languages while maintaining these high accuracy rates.
High Processing Volume and Scalability
More than 1000 publishers manage their entire advertising revenue stacks through the client’s platform to buy and sell ads across global marketplace, powering tens of billions of monthly ad impressions each month. Finding a solution that could keep up with massive amounts of data, as well as the ability to scale upwards.
Platform Integration
The client has existing cross-platform integrations with dozens of the industry’s largest trading desks, and publishers so integration capabilities were another key requirement in a solution.
The Solution: zveloCAT
As is often the case, industry leaders from one sector gravitate toward industry leaders of another, which brought the client to begin discussions with zvelo. The client’s team quickly realized that zvelo would be the front runner for a solution as it was able to meet each of the technical requirements by leveraging zveloCAT, a real-time web content classification engine which delivers results via API.
zveloCAT enables access to the industry’s leading web content categorization platform for in-depth topical, objectionable and sensitive URL categorizations. The capability to deliver granular categorizations for highly dynamic content at the page, post or article level set zvelo apart from the competition early in the process.
“By partnering with zvelo, we were able to achieve value beyond simply meeting technical requirements,” stated the client’s CTO. “We have a shared commitment to delivering a safe, secure internet experience by ensuring every ad, every person, and every interaction or engagement passing through our platform is safe, secure and appropriately aligned according to varying degrees of brand safety standards.”
The Results
By utilizing the accuracy and performance of zveloCAT to improve comprehensive brand safety across its inventory, the client began experiencing measurable results across its platform. Among the notable improvements was the enhanced ability for the client to further segment its premium and long-tail inventory to expand key revenue growth opportunities, as well as improve its meticulous curation at scale. Improved segmentation also proved to deliver a measurable boost in critical performance metrics including CTR and brand lift across the client’s platform. The client is now looking ahead to the future as the ad tech industry continues to adapt to changes in privacy laws and technology platforms — confident they have all the pieces in place to thrive amid the disruption.
