New York – DoubleVerify, the pioneer and worldwide leader in online media verification and compliance, announced BrandShield 2.0, a real-time page-level and geo-level blocking solution. Advertisers and agencies can now ensure that ads are served to pages with approved and safe content. A vital tool to protecting a brand’s reputation, BrandShield identifies undesirable and unwanted web pages to prevent incidents before they occur. The solution can be customized based on black list sites, white list sites, inappropriate page content categories and targeted geographies. These features also can be utilized by ad networks, demand side platforms and ad exchanges through the BrandShield Connect API.
DoubleVerify’s ability to accurately see through multiple layers of i-frames enables it to identify the placement of an ad 96% of the time, making its technology superior to competitors who can only verify an ad about 30% to 60% of the time. In a six-week test DoubleVerify conducted this year with three Fortune 500 brand advertisers, it analyzed campaigns across 244 million impressions and found that:
– Precise identification of content allowed for more ads to be served on brand-safe pages. Publishers added 25% more inventory when page-level blocking was used versus domain-level blocking. One entertainment site served 600,000 more impressions that would have been blocked with domain-level restrictions.
– Geo-blocking was effectively applied to every continent according to each advertiser’s criteria, with impressions blocked from Canada (35%), European countries (26%), Australia (5%), Asian countries (5%) and Africa and other regions (29%). This is an effective feature for pharmaceutical marketers who may be restricted from advertising in some countries. Research published in DoubleVerify’s Trust Index found that unintended international impressions can reach as high as 40 percent of total ads served on every campaign.
“Page level ad blocking will provide advertisers with the highest level of brand safety and compliance, even on sites that contain a mix of different content types, while allowing ad networks and publishers to better monetize ad inventory,” said Oren Netzer, CEO of DoubleVerify. “To boost transparency and accountability in the industry, we’ve built our solution to specifically address this problem. With DoubleVerify delivering a 96% see-through rate, the rate at which ad impressions can be accurately located and verified, we can evaluate site and page content and make the best real-time judgment to protect an advertiser’s brand. The precision in the technology protects the interests of all companies in the online ad ecosystem.”
BrandShield enables marketers and agencies to control where their brand appears. Before an ad is served to a page, DoubleVerify analyzes the site content with a proprietary crawling technology and compares it with the agency campaign guidelines to ensure that the page meets certain criteria. DoubleVerify identifies for more than 75 possible inappropriate content categories. With BrandShield 2.0, DoubleVerify added more granular categories such as natural disasters, aviation accidents and financial crisis, among others. This is an advantage for some of the most active online marketers such as finance and airline companies whose ads are continually served on negative content pages because of unsophisticated contextual targeting methods. Marketers have three ways to block undesirable content:
Domain-level – block ads from appearing on certain domains
Page-level – instead of blocking an entire domain, marketers may allow only appropriate pages to display the ad within a domain
Geo-level – block ads from being served to unintended international audiences
By working with DoubleVerify, ad networks and publishers can ensure that impressions are qualified before campaigns are served. This boosts monetization for publishers with frequently changing content such as news, user-generated content and blogs. Page-level blocking gives advertisers the precision and control they need to serve ads on these sites, while keeping with the brands’ compliance standards. DoubleVerify ensures that no impressions are wasted and that every appropriate page and ad unit is monetized.
“Our partnership with DoubleVerify continues to provide our clients with a truly best in class solution,” said Michael Katz, CEO, interclick. “With interclick, they know that they are reaching only the most desirable consumers while DoubleVerify ensures they are reached exclusively in the most coveted environments.”
“In online advertising there is still some uncertainty around whether specific websites or web content add value to an advertiser’s brand, or in fact hurt the brand. BrandShield 2.0 helps alleviate that uncertainty by verifying ad placement based on every page,” says Mitch Weinstein, vice president and director of Digital Ad Operations at UM. This type of protection makes sure that our clients are showing up on premium, relevant content that is brand safe.”
About DoubleVerify
DoubleVerify (www.doubleverify.com) is the worldwide leader in online advertising verification and the top choice of marketers, agencies, ad networks and publishers looking to ensure brand safety, campaign transparency and regulatory compliance. DoubleVerify verifies over 35 billion advertising impressions per month for hundreds of leading Fortune 500 marketers. DoubleVerify is headquartered in New York City, with sales offices in London and engineering offices in Tel Aviv, Israel. Investors in DoubleVerify include Blumberg Capital, Institutional Venture Partners, First Round Capital and Genacast Ventures.
