Ozone has launched a content classification solution aimed at improving upon overzealous brand safety tools that have wrongly steered advertisers away from advertising against suitable content.
Aura is billed as a “proprietary audience access and content classification solution” that helps advertisers connect with more of their target audiences across publishing brands on Ozone’s platform.
It uses “natural language processing” to analyse content at a page level and generate signals including content categories, keywords, sentiment, named entities and brand safety risk tiers. Ozone believes this offers “a more accurate view of every page” on publisher sites than extant brand safety tools.
The Media Leader understands Aura will be applied to all Ozone campaigns by default.
Craig Tuck, Ozone’s chief revenue officer, called the launch of Aura a “significant step forward for our advertiser customers”, adding that “legacy brand safety tools were built for restriction, not reach — and that’s been costing advertisers in terms of maximising their addressable audience.”
The solution is also capable of multilingual content classification, offering advertisers improved confidence in sitting against editorial content in non-English languages.
“By classifying content at a deeper, more nuanced level, Aura opens up significantly more brand-safe content and ensures advertisers can actually connect with more of their audiences,” Tuck explained.
In early testing, Ozone claims Aura was found to deliver a 35% increase in addressable users, driven by a 36% uplift in page views, without compromising legitimate brand safety concerns.
The tool is similar to other contextual advertising solutions, such as the Reach-founded Mantis.
Such tools have been developed as part of an effort to combat keyword blocklists that have at times wrongly de-monitised half of news publisher articles on a given subject.
While the solutions may claw back revenue for publishers, research from the likes of Stagwell and Bountiful Cow has shown that all news is effective for advertisers to sit against, undermining advertisers’ belief that brand safety should be considered in the first place when advertising against news brands.
As Stagwell CEO Mark Penn told The Media Leader, there is a “perverse distortion in the marketplace built on a false notion of brand safety.”
Bountiful Cow study finds all news is brand-safe, with ‘unsafe’ inventory most effective
