Brand Safety: Online Advertisers Verifying Ad Inventory with zveloDB
Aside from brand safety, other success metrics online advertisers may focus on are the actual visibility of ads within web pages (i.e. “above the fold” or in-view placements and across various devices), accuracy of demographic and contextual targeting to match desired audiences with the right online content, avoiding fraud sites, finding the right pricing models, media costs and ROI, dependent on the types of goals established. The growing quantity of players and complexity of cross-party relationships within the online advertising market adds another layer of confusion and uncertainty when it comes time to place ads. Should advertisers place ads directly with publishers, considering they can afford to? Should they hire an agency to help with strategic planning and media buys facilitation? Should they leverage data from and place ads through “middle men” like web analytics firms, demand side platforms (DSP), ad exchanges or ad networks, or those specializing in the mobile space? The options are clearly plentiful and can be overwhelming.
Regardless of how advertisers approach online advertising buys, maintaining brand safety should be at the forefront of the decision. In a recent vCE™ Charter Study conducted by comScore that involved twelve of the leading advertisers in the U.S. (e.g. Ford, HTC, Sprint, Discover and others), it was discovered that in nearly 75% of the online ad campaigns analyzed, some impressions were served on websites with inappropriate content. This equated to 92,000 people being shown ads for major brands on pages with offensive content. 1 This alarming discovery implies that ad serving technologies need further enhancements and that advertisers deserve greater transparency into the actual impressions served.
At zvelo, brand safety, protection, and security have been our focal points for many years. zvelo website categorization technologies and the zveloDB® URL Database are at the core of numerous web security applications, and are proven solutions in use today at top online publishers and advertising technology providers for ad placement verification and real-world ad inventory vetting. zvelo has dedicated category sets for objectionable online content (adult, porn, hate, criminal, vices, etc.) and offers instant detection of malicious or compromised URLs, as well as revisit logic to recategorize legitimate websites that go from infected to clean. zvelo category sets can be mapped to IAB contextual taxonomy standards, in addition to those of other online advertising regulatory/compliance organizations. Players within the online advertising market will be hard pressed to find a more tenured, reliable, responsive, accurate and data-centric website categorization services provider.
Reference:
1. Unknown Author. (March 26, 2012). comScore Releases Full Results of vCE™ Charter Study Involving 12 Leading U.S. Advertisers. comScore.com. Retrieved April 05, 2012 from http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2012/3/comScore_Releases_Full_Results_of_vCE_Charter_Study
