zvelo Provides Brand-Safe Verification for a fast-growing Ad Exchange Network
A fast growing Ad Exchange Network with Real-Time Bidding (RTB) and Demand Side Platform (DSP) offerings desired to move beyond ad delivery, verification and post-impression analysis and provide product differentiation through pre-emptive brand safety and improved transparency for its customers.
Client Profile
A fast-growing Ad Exchange vendor with over 20 billion impressions monthly (“Customer”).
Deployment Requirement
The Customer has a network of dozens of Ubuntu-based Linux servers and required a “distributed” deployment of the zvelo’s systems across their servers.
“To continue our growth in an increasingly and highly competitive market, we needed to create even more product differentiation. We identified brand safety and transparency as the areas that are the most meaningful to our customers and also the areas that are the biggest challenges for the industry. We felt if we could make a disruptive breakthrough in these key areas, it would provide a foundation for continued rapid growth.”
-Managing Director, Customer
Business Challenge
The Customer had gained considerable traction and market share since the initial launch of their DSP and RTB offerings. However, to continue their revenue growth rate, the Customer had to demonstrate meaningful product differentiation to both prospective customers and investors. Simply performing accurate ad verification and post-impression analytics was no longer a compelling differentiator.
The Customer identified several issues related to brand safety that were critical to adding new and larger advertising customers, including:
The Customer believed that successfully addressing these critical brand safety issues would provide a significant competitive advantage.
“Our existing RTB and DSP platforms didn’t have the URL database support required to perform pre-emptive categorization look-ups at the volume of impressions our business plan required. Further, we had very limited visibility to compromised or malicious website data or any way to perform real-time validation of a URL being clean or infected at the specific time we were placing an ad. These were the features our customers and advertisers were telling us they required.”
-VP Business Development, Customer
The Solution
Once the Customer made the decision to focus on developing and emphasizing pre-emptive brand safety, they identified the need for a high-performance URL database with real-time content categorization and malicious website detection, as well as the ability to distribute the database across the dozens (and growing) of servers on which the RTB and DSP platforms operated. After identifying zvelo as a possible vendor, the Customer undertook a thorough investigation of the following:
The Customer finalized the relationship with zvelo after determining zvelo was able to successfully address each of these requirements.
“We were able to put zvelo through the paces on our requirements and they stood up to the testing very well. Their coverage, accuracy and malicious website detection gave us confidence that we could indeed target a superior brand safety offering with the zveloDB. Further, the flexibility of the zveloDB SDK to be deployed across the dozens of servers that support our platform systems, combined with the outstanding responsiveness of zvelo from initial contact through testing, integration and launch, convinced me they were the right partner for us.”
-VP Platform Systems, Customer
By The Numbers
Customer’s DSP and RTB Platforms in Action
The Customer finalized implementation of the zveloDB SDK across the distributed RTB and DSP servers, using a “primary” zveloDB SDK to communicate with the zvelo’s cloud network for updates, real-time URL categorizations and zvelo Instant Protection™ (zIP) – a real-time malicious website detection feature. The primary zveloDB SDK also acted as a conduit for providing updates to the distributed databases on other servers.
The Customer’s RTB and DSP platforms query the zveloDB SDK using URLs for pre-emptive brand safety verification (e.g. is the URL an appropriate category and is the URL malicious or compromised). The zveloDB SDK processes (on each of the servers) work with the following processes:
URLs not found in any of these databases are delivered to zvelo’s cloud systems for real-time contextual content categorization and malicious detection analysis. In the event a URL is categorized as blockable, inappropriate or malicious, the URL and the associated category values are immediately distributed to the zveloCACHE of the zveloDB SDKs.
zvelo’s ability to harness the collective web activity of all of the URL queries and users provides the basis for the extremely high coverage and dynamic changes of the websites, including social sites, domains, malicious websites and more. Each additional customer and user increases the breadth of websites visited and categorized, thereby further increasing the coverage and malicious website detection for all of the collective users.
Ease of Integration
The Customer required a simple and proven SDK that could be implemented easily across the dozens of Ubuntu-based Linux servers of the RTB and DSP platforms. Additionally, the Customer required a SDK that could handle the significant query volume projected in the coming years. The complete integration of the zveloDB SDK was completed in less than a week and the Customer was able to launch the enhanced brand safety offerings on schedule.
Benefits of zvelo’s Solution
The coverage, accuracy, malicious website detection, real-time categorization updates, scalable and distributed SDK deployment, query performance and responsiveness all combined to provide the Customer with the features and capabilities necessary to aggressively position their RTB and DSP offerings with a strong pre-emptive brand safety message.
“The zvelo SDK integration was very simple – it required just a few APIs to be developed. We worked with zvelo to create the category mapping we required and we completed integration in under a week. Within a few weeks we completed testing and were in production. The ability of the zveloDB SDK to be easily deployed across our distributed servers was also a big bonus and eliminated the labor we would have had to otherwise spend on managing the multiple implementations and updating process. Finally, zvelo was outstanding in supporting our team through the entire process.”
– VP Platform Systems, Customer
The Results
The Customer was able to secure new customers and advertisers through aggressive promotion of the pre-emptive brand safety messaging, backed up by successful results in testing and ad campaigns. Additionally, the Customer was able to significantly reduce the time and energy spent on damage control due to ads being placed on inappropriate or malicious websites. The positive brand safety messaging and positioning are supporting the Customer’s continued rapid growth trajectory.
“We have been able to successfully target an opportunity in the market for a differentiated, pre-emptive brand safety message and offering by virtue of integrating zvelo’s API and database database technologies. We have big growth plans and zvelo is a considerable part of supporting these efforts.”
– CEO, Customer
