Tech MVP 2021: SCMP Signal

SCMP Signal

By South China Morning Post

Devised and built in Hong Kong, SCMP Signal was launched to market in May 2020. This proprietary brand suitability tool seeks to offer greater brand safety for marketers with customisable, contextual, keyword and sentiment targeting options.

While current technology only starts to analyse content after a critical mass is reached, leaving brands exposed to unsafe content, SCMP Signal was designed to work the moment the article is published. It works across all platforms by using NLP to read keywords, context and sentiment to determine the true nature of the article.

Since its launch last year, SCMP Signal is now used to guarantee the brand safety of 100% of campaigns. Clients such as Cartier and Apple, who didn't advertise in the past, now feel safe to advertise in SCMP's news environment. Signal has increased the available audience reach by up to 26%, as well as driving the CTR performance of direct campaigns by up to 40%.

The successful rollout of SCMP Signal is just the beginning. The plan is to constantly innovate and improve the product to ensure it supports ad quality and performance. Among other developments, SCMP Signal will be updated this year to include ad fraud detection and viewability measurement to complete its set of ad verification tools.

Tech MVP jury members praised SCMP Signal for ensuring SCMP is a brand-safe platform. The jury members noted scalability as a challenge, can they make this tech available for other publications to deploy?