Brand Safety As A Service

*UPDATE* 11th October 2017:

James Pringle
Aug 27, 2017 · 3 min read

We are delighted to announce that The Telegraph is using our solution to block video content appearing next to sensitive news such as death, crime and terrorism.

Suggestv announced our Publisher Video Manifesto that sets out the 5 things publishers should be thinking about in order to build a scalable and lucrative on-site video strategy. The one we have had the most emails/tweets/questions about is — brand safety.

So we wanted to write a short post to discuss:

a) why this is so important for publishers
b) why it is important for video in particular
c) how does Suggestv offer Brand Safety As A Service

Why is brand safety so important in the publisher space:

Most publishers make their money from advertising. That means they are directly competing with the likes of Google/YouTube, Facebook/Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat for ad spend.

Successful advertising is about spreading a message to increase customer purchase intent.

Audience is about hitting as many of the right people as possible. Attention is about engaging those people enough to convey a marketing message.

Instagram has over 700 million users. Social offers brands the opportunity to launch campaigns on a huge scale.

Publishers don’t and won’t ever have that scale, so they have to offer something different. Better formats, better targeting, whatever it is to compete for ad spend.

Social platforms fall down on brand safety due to their reliance on User Generated Content (UGC). This was highlighted in March when the major agencies paused ad spend on YouTube due to advertising appearing against extremist content.

Publishers create, curate and edit their own professional content. This is their unique offering. They pay professionals to make premium content. Then advertisers are given the opportunity to associate their brands with that content in a premium environment.

Brand Safety IS a publishers competitive advantage.

Why is this important for video in particular:

Our belief is that we now operate in a Video First media landscape. Ad budgets are shifting towards video and video advertising is much more valuable than display advertising. TV ad spend is the holy grail. This is what Facebook and Google are fighting over. Big budgets, high level production creative, etc.

Publishers have to embrace video as the new norm of media consumption. This is a huge opportunity and a chance to generate better yield from professional content. But to differentiate from the big boys… they need to make sure that the videos and the environment are brand safe. Facebook is not reliably brand safe. YouTube is not reliably brand safe. So premium publishers video sections need to be brand safe!

How does Suggestv offer Brand Safety As A Service:

Suggestv’s intelligent video recommendation technology is focused on semantics. We strongly believe relevancy is critical to automated video insertion. Our technology reads the article and understands it. Therefore, we understand the environment, context and sentiment of the article. It is much more than ‘keywords’, it is natural language processing supported by machine learning. Our technology also reads the video metadata and understands it. The data we use to make video recommendations is simply reapplied to make sure that the article and the content we serve is brand safe.

We have a sentiment rating that a publisher can adjust depending on the sensitivity of their audience, editorial voice, and advertising clients. Currently this is a managed service, but it is a powerful tool for publishers looking to grow revenue via an effective on site video strategy.

Looking forward:

We are just at the start and expect to continue developing our video brand safety tools to help publishers. In September we will be launching our new dashboard, and we plan to add many more self-service features in v2, v3 etc.

*UPDATE* 11th October 2017:

We are delighted to announce that The Telegraph is using our solution to block video content appearing next to sensitive news such as death, crime and terrorism.

Your suggestions:

Please give us a ‘clap’ to spread the word and respond below with questions and suggestions on how we can further develop our Brand Safety As A Service.

About Suggestv

Automated Video Distribution. Suggestv is the World’s leading video recommendation solution. Headquartered in London. Suggestv is powering video experiences for the World’s largest media companies. Please get in touch to find out more — hello@suggestv.io

Suggestv

Intelligent Video Discovery. Writing about video, technology and where they intersect.

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James Pringle

Written by

Founder/CEO @ Suggestv. Writing about video, media, advertising & technology. Reading about driverless cars, cryptocurrency, VR & hyperloop.

Suggestv

Suggestv

Intelligent Video Discovery. Writing about video, technology and where they intersect.

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