Nielsen is gearing up to plug video brand safety features in to its Digital Ad Ratings, after investing to acquire a minority stake in OpenSlate this month.
OpenSlate provides data about the content, subject matter and suitability of more than 600 million YouTube and Facebook videos for advertisers to determine whether the inventory is a good fit for their brand.
It is one of a growing plethora of “brand safety” tools aiming to give ad buyers more control.
“What Open Slate does is it uses machine learning to work out what a brand-safe environment looks like for a particular brand, and it’s able to score back to the advertiser whether or not their advertising got into the right content,” says Nielsen Global Media’s chief commercial officer Megan Clarken in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“We think that that is imperative to a hygiene metric, a true reach metric, and it’s an important output for the advertiser to know that they got what they paid for.”
Meanwhile, Clarken says, whilst cross-screen measurement of TV shows with linear ad shows is rolled out, comparing apples to apples when different TV environments include different ad sizes and ad loads remains a complex challenge.
“Being able to credit based on something like, ‘was somebody watching a TV programme, but at the same time on their iPad and on their phone looking at content at the same time?’ – how do you credit that to the minute? It’s really tricky,” she says.
“The devil’s in the details somewhat. It’s very tricky to put the rules around that and make sure that you ground yourself on a standard which is a common standard that the industry agrees to so that you can implement.”
This video is part of a series of interviews conducted during Advertising Week New York, 2019. This series is co-production of Beet.TV and Advertising Week. The series is sponsored by Roundel, a Target company. Please see more videos from Advertising Week right here.