The customer, a leading digital video advertising platform provider that helps advertisers drive ROI, while providing publishers with maximum opportunities to monetize their inventories, required comprehensive and highly accurate contextual content categorization of URLs and web pages to ensure brand safety and increase transparency.
Profile:
Leading digital video advertising platform provider (“Platform Provider”)
Industry:
Digital Video Advertising
Deployment Requirement:
The Platform Provider required a hybrid integration that entailed an on-disk SDK deployment within their globally distributed data centers, backed with a cloud API to allow for real-time look ups and contextual content categorization of new web inventory and dynamic websites. In addition, the Platform Provider required a solution that could rapidly scale and support the significant growth of the video ad marketplace.
“We were particularly focused on finding a URL database and content classification solution that provided extremely broad coverage and very high accuracy for the web inventory being targeted by our advertisers. These sites are highly dynamic in nature, so we needed a solution that could keep up with the changing content deep within these domains. Further, part of our mission is to provide transparency throughout the process, as well as complying with industry quality assurance guidelines. So, we required a solution that conformed to the appropriate QAGs.”
– CTO, Platform Provider
The zveloDB URL database helps ensure advertiser brand safety on smartphones, tablets, PCs and web-connected TVs
The Challenge:
As an early mover in the nascent video advertising marketplace, the Platform Provider emerged as a market leader over the past several years. However, as new entrants identified the growth opportunities of the video ad market and competition escalated, the Platform Provider recognized it needed to raise the bar for its service offerings. They had invested resources in providing a basic level of video ad placement verification, but realized that a combination of increased competition and an explosion of video ad demand meant it needed to accelerate its ability to provide broader coverage, improved accuracy and transparency in order to maintain or increase its market share. The Platform Provider required a vastly more comprehensive URL database to ensure the coverage levels and accuracy demanded by its advertisers and publishers, as well as a classification engine capable of delivering web page content categorizations at significantly higher volumes.
The Platform Provider identified a number of requirements for a URL database and contextual content categorization, including:
| Comprehensive coverage – coverage of a wide range of popular and dynamic websites where content is constantly changing. | |||
| Highly accurate categorizations – an accurate database of categorized URLs that combines automated systems for the large volume of URL classifications being performed, backed by human quality assurance review. | |||
| High URL query performance – the URL database and web content classification engine were required to keep pace with large query volumes common of the video ad market. | |||
| Scalability – a solution that could accommodate an extremely rapid growth of URL queries, especially during high volume peak periods like holidays and within high business growth segments such as the Platform Provider’s programmatic advertising offering and their booming mobile ad inventory solutions. | |||
| Industry compliance and transparency – abiding by various online advertising industry quality assurance guidelines and best practices already in effect and those under review, especially when related to providing both advertisers and publishers with greater transparency about where video ads are placed and how they perform. | |||
| Rapid categorizations of new web pages and dynamic inventory – a classification engine capable of categorizing new and dynamic websites in real-time — most critical for proliferating web content. | |||
| Malicious and phishing website protection – provide real-time identification and protection against malicious and phishing URLs. Also important was the ability to quickly revisit and “clear” legit websites after being cleaned. | |||
| Online privacy assurance – as “do not track” legislation like GDPR continues to expand around the world, the Platform Provider required a solution that would help with the creation and implementation of mechanisms to help grant people greater control over their personal privacy online as it relates to the types of web content being viewed. | |||
| Locally hosted on-disk SDK – due to the lightning speed at which online video ad units are placed, a highly accurate database of categorized URLs needed to be locally hosted within the Platform Provider’s infrastructure to minimize ad placement verification lag and latency. | |||
| Lightweight API integration – a lightweight API was required to support high-speed URL queries and increasing volumes over time. | |||
| Flexible pricing model – a pricing structure that mirrored the Platform Provider’s business model was required and one that could adapt to CPM-based (cost-per-thousand impressions), cost-per-action-based, and other models that the Platform Provider had established in conjunction with advertisers, agencies, marketers, publishers and third parties. | |||
| Custom URL category mapping – the flexibility to map the categories of the URL database to the Platform Provider’s custom category sets as well as those established by industry organizations like the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB). | |||
| Dedicated support – the Platform Provider required a technology partner that could provide always available and dedicated technical support during the evaluation, integration and production phases and the same high level of responsiveness with day-to-day business matters and other general inquiries thereafter. | |||
As noted, the Platform Provider identified numerous requirements for a web content categorization engine and URL database from a vendor with the proven track record and ability to provide the desired speed, performance, accuracy, coverage and flexibility to accommodate existing business strategies and future growth.
“Our clientele is extremely demanding, which resulted in undertaking an extensive and exhaustive review of possible vendors and their solutions. We not only needed a vendor that could meet our technical and performance requirements, but also one that was extremely responsive to the changing dynamics of the online video ad marketplace.”
– CTO, Platform Provider
The Evaluation:
The Platform Provider conducted a comprehensive evaluation of the zveloDB™ URL database, with specific emphasis on web coverage, accuracy and performance for various types of web pages and content types, including identification and categorization of brand-safe and objectionable or inappropriate content across a wide range and deep within highly dynamic websites.
The evaluation criteria included:
| Coverage and accuracy – an evaluation of the accuracy of the zveloDB URL database was conducted, with an in-depth analysis of over 120,000 URLs pulled from actual ad inventory, which consisted of varied web content types. | |||
| Highly accurate categorizations – an accurate database of categorized URLs that combines automated systems for the large volume of URL classifications being performed, backed by human quality assurance review. | |||
| Brand-safe detection & coverage – a test was performed of the zveloDB URL database for coverage of porn, sex, violence and other objectionable web content in various languages to help ensure advertiser brand safety and to abide to industry best practices and guidelines. | |||
| Malicious website detection – an evaluation of zvelo’s coverage and detection of malicious websites, including those targeting smartphones and tablets, was performed, using a range of proprietary and third-party feeds and blacklists. Specific tests were also performed that evaluated the speed at which zvelo revisited websites previously detected as malicious to determine the revisit logic as/when websites are cleaned up or taken offline. | |||
| Quality Assurance Guideline compliance and category mapping – the Platform Provider evaluated zvelo’s ability to provide the required mapping flexibility to adhere to a number of industry QAG’s by testing a range of URLs for proper category responses. | |||
| Ease of integration – integration of the on-disk zveloDB SDK and REST API was assessed to verify that the hybrid deployment approach would satisfy the fast and high volume query speeds being seen by the Platform Provider. | |||
| Dedicated support – the Platform Provider closely graded the quality of the technical support provided during the evaluation period as a precursor to the level of responsiveness to be delivered following the production roll out. | |||
“After the extensive testing and evaluation process, we concluded that zvelo’s technologies were an ideal fit for our online video ad platforms. Further, the responsiveness and commitment by the zvelo team throughout the entire process was exactly the type of partner we were hoping to find to support our growth plans.”
– CTO, Platform Provider
Following the thorough evaluation, the Platform Provider and zvelo agreed to a technology partnership for the integration and deployment of the zveloDB URL database in the Platform Provider’s digital video ad platform to enhance and help assure advertiser brand safety and grant greater transparency and visibility of video ad placements to all players involved – advertisers, agencies, marketers, publishers and other third parties.
Contextual Content Categorization in Action
The Platform Provider’s digital video ad platform programmatically queries the zveloDB URL database running on servers deployed in their data centers and, for new active web traffic, conducts asynchronous cloud queries for real-time contextual content categorization. Video ad inventory is vetted and verified on-the-fly and ad placements/impressions are allowed only after web pages are deemed brand safe.
zvelo’s ability to harness the collective web activity of the millions of users across all of zvelo’s Partners provides the basis for the extremely high coverage of the ActiveWeb*. Each additional user increases the breadth of ActiveWeb sites visited and categorized, thereby further increasing the coverage, accuracy and malicious or inappropriate website detection for the collective end-user community.
Results and Benefits of zvelo’s Web Content Categorization
The zveloDB provided the required website coverage of 99.9%, accuracy and performance to keep pace with the Platform Provider’s rapid growth in the online video ad marketplace. zvelo’s flexible deployment options, industry-compliant QAG category mapping and pricing were also key factors in solidifying a technology partnership. The Platform Provider further benefits from zvelo’s real-time contextual content categorization engine and malicious website detection capabilities providing protection from inappropriate, dangerous and malicious websites and other web-based threats. The Platform Provider quickly integrated the zveloDB to further enhance and assure a brand safe video ad platform and to allow greater transparency for advertisers, agencies, marketers, publishers and other third parties alike.
“As the emerging leader in the online video ad marketplace, we wanted to partner with a vendor that could support our growth and business plans – and zvelo has turned out be precisely the type of partner we had in mind when we started this process.”
– CEO, Platform Provider
*ActiveWeb – websites and web content visited by actual users.
