Tech talk: Brand safety, location data, third-party header bidding, more

MediaMath announced the launch of Curated Market, which the company said offers cross-device audience reach and high-quality, brand-safe, premium media. More than 7,000 advertisers and 500 publishers are participating.

MediaMath said Curated Market employs "stringent" brand-safety standards and protocols including:

• Focus on large scale, high quality publishers based on ComScore
• Privileged access to high-priority inventory in the publisher ad server
• Transparent, validated URLs only
• Most direct technical execution path to validated URLs
• An evolving and dynamic Universal Block List of restricted content
• Exclusion of most user generated content, specifically in environments or on publishers that do not support content monitoring, verification and blocking
• Integrations with leading third party verification platforms including Integral Ad Science, DoubleVerify and Peer39 to provide brand safety filters
• Proprietary Suspicious Traffic Filter inside MediaMath’s platform
• Exclusion of sites or content promoting illegal activity, hateful or distasteful rhetoric

In beta testing, a major US retailer, saw a 50 percent reduction in CPAs and a 3X improvement in response rate and a major internet television provider saw a 40 percent increase in unique reach and a 12 percent increase in conversions, when compared to open auction.

Joe Zawadzki, chairman and CEO, MediaMath:

Digital advertising has long promised the ability to change how marketers interact with their customers, but the ubiquity of channels and content means marketers need to be more selective. The Curated Market offering provides transparency and hygiene in execution and reporting, audience addressability at scale and accountability for actors in the digital ecosystem, across all channels. It will change the way marketers think about buying ads.

ComScore launched its MMX Multi-Platform, along with upgrades to Mobile Metrix, in India.

The introduction of Android mobile panel data expands comScore’s measurement of mobile audiences in India to enable more robust reporting of visitation, engagement and demographics, including new segments for age and gender, the company said. 

With February 2017 data, comScore will also upgrade its enumeration source for India to the I-Cube universe estimates, reporting a total digital population of 201 million unique visitors/viewers in India.

Kedar Gavane, vice president, India, ComScore:

As part of our continued commitment to improve data accuracy and adapt to the rapid growth of mobile in the India market, we are thrilled to announce the introduction of mobile panel data which will enable more granular insights into audiences and their content consumption across devices and platforms. This marks an important step forward in advancing measurement in the industry, and we look forward to delivering even more valuable data and insights that advertisers, agencies and publishers need to develop their digital strategies and understand the competitive, multi-platform landscape.

Big Mobile and xAd announced a partnership to bring xAd’s location technology to Australia and New Zealand.

Through the partnership, marketers will have access to meaningful location data, allowing them to learn more about their businesses, actively engage their consumers through precise location and audience targeting, and measure footfall, according to the companies.

David Green, Big Mobile CEO:

For location, it’s a game changer. We hear so much hype in the market about location, but xAd’s proven technology is the most accurate and highly measurable solution out there with products that are third-party validated by industry-leading measurement firms.

Video ad serving platform SpotX announced an evolution in its existing server-to-server bidding product, allowing media owners to integrate third-party header bidding into their yield-management programs.

The new tools give media owners flexible options for competing all demand sources simultaneously to ensure the highest paying ad is surfaced on every opportunity, according to the company. Media owners will be able to manage demand partner latency, set price floors, allocate priority tiers to campaigns, access integrated analysis and reporting tools, and honor all campaign contracts.

Kevin Hunt, SpotX senior director of product management:

Integrated ad serving and SSP tools enable media owners to execute server-to-server bidding—a more efficient and effective method of competing demand sources than header bidding. Server-to-server bidding operates via direct server integrations between SSPs and DSPs, and as a result of the direct integration, reduces latency, data leakage and error sources associated with client-side header bidding. It allows for an infinite number of demand partners to be competed simultaneously to ensure the highest paying ad is surfaced on each opportunity.

In cases where media owners have contractual obligations or technology limitations necessitating different header bidding executions, SpotX will provide two core options:

• Direct integration with SpotX’s advanced ad server, with support for third-party client-side header bidders.
• Header bidding support for Google’s DoubleClick For Publishers (DFP). This option allows a media owner to continue to use its third-party header bidding partners, but SpotX will submit the winning bid to DFP, regardless of whether the winning bid is from SpotX or from one of the third-party header bidding partners.

The tie-up combines Blis’ location technology with TVTY’s Social Trend Trigger to allow brands to run hyper-targeted campaigns when certain keywords or phrases are trending on social media. 

Greg Isbister, CEO of Blis:

When brands place relevant ads in front of consumers when they’ll be most receptive to them, they’ll see unparalleled ad engagement. And with full integration between the TVTY platform and Blis’ technology, new and existing clients can seize the benefits of the Social Trigger Trend Trigger and location-based moment marketing right away.

Hotmob announced the launch of a safety-first demand side platform (DSP), which focuses on quality, brand safety and transparency.

The proprietary DSP, named ALCANZAR, applies category filters and content parameters to measure whether a publisher's content meets a brand's specific needs. Both pre-bid and post-bid screening is applied to increase brand-safety controls, allowing advertisers to screen the URL or site section, therefore offering more transparency on where ads are running, according to the company.

Johnny Wong, Hotmob CEO:

We understand how important brand safety is for brands and advertisers as we have over 10 years of experience in managing and serving premium digital advertising. We have a whitelist established with hand-picked apps and websites to ensure ads are delivered in safe environment through our DSP.