Announcing Rocket Fuel’s Real-Time Brand Safety Shield
(by Ari Levenfeld)
Brand Safety is a top priority for our brand advertisers and their agencies, and at Rocket Fuel we treat it as a matter of the utmost importance. So we’re proud to announce the details on how our Real-Time Brand Safety Shield provides the highest levels of brand assurance to our clients.
At Rocket Fuel we take a proactive approach, with three layers of defense that block bad sites and pages before we ever serve a single ad on them. By building additional levels of safety and security right into our platform and processes, we ensure our technology delivers both ROI and peace of mind for brands. We’ll have even more news in the coming weeks about the upcoming ad verification guidelines that we are helping to drive as part of a working group established to create brand safety verification guidelines. The working group is a joint effort between the IAB and the MRC (Media Rating Council).
What are the three layers of protection in the Real-time Brand Safety Shield?
- The first layer is real-time protection provided by DoubleVerify, Peer39, AdExpose or other third party as desired by a client, wherein each impression is reviewed individually and in milliseconds.
- The second layer is a partnership with AdSafe, with whom we continuously refine our library of sites and patterns.
- The third layer consists of a proprietary library of non-brandsafe sites and words. For example, our black list and white list technology allow for an unlimited number of sites and keywords. We don’t just block bad sites, we also block bad pages within good sites, such as incendiary political content or hate speech. Our in-house list has tens of thousands of them and all are manually reviewed.
How does the Rocket Fuel Real-time Brand Safety Shield work?
Rocket Fuel recognizes that the variety of available brand protection solutions possess different strengths, methods of categorizing content and securing brand safety. None of them are perfect. Protecting our clients’ brand is of the utmost importance to us, so we take a radical, multi-layered approach to ensure that our clients are protected. Our solution includes:
- Site Exclusions – When sites are identified as unsafe, Rocket Fuel bans them from the network at the domain level. This prevents our system from ever bidding on impressions on behalf of our advertisers that contain a known, unsafe domain.
- Real-time Filtering – We have multiple controls in place to block undesirable content in real time, using a combination of third party and proprietary technology. Our foundational solutions and technology continually identify sites and pages that are unsafe. Our real-time keyword filtering blocks any site or page with potentially offending content before we bid on it.
- Manual Validation – At Rocket Fuel we believe it is critical to combine both human and machine reviews. Our team double-checks third party verification results creating the most comprehensive keyword exclusion, content category filters and network-level site filters.
- AdSafe – This brand safety and verification service provides domain-level analysis, page-level analysis, semantic analysis and image analysis. Sites are given separate scores for a range of categories. AdSafe results are fed back into our system, and are included in our real-time brand safety shield.
- DoubleVerify, Peer39, AdExpose and other Third Party Providers – We work with these vendors to create customized Rocket Fuel-specific category filtering, tags and a verification profile. Sensitive categories of content where advertisers do not want their ads to serve are filtered out. The system also verifies and excludes pages with a high percentage of ad clutter. We recognize that clients may have specific preferences or preexisting relationships with specific brand safety third parties and are always happy to work with any providers our clients desire.
- Proprietary Ad Server – We have a complete ad serving platform behind the exchanges, enabling us to add layers of defense beyond what the exchanges can offer and to quickly implement new technology.
- Brand Assurance Expertise – We have a dedicated brand assurance officer whose sole focus is on monitoring all of the above processes and systems, making decisions on policy, offering guidance to clients and continuously analyzing & improving the Rocket Fuel brand assurance shield.
Ari Levenfeld is the Brand Safety Officer at Rocket Fuel. Ari has spent the last decade working in ad technology focusing specifically on compliance, editorial guidelines and brand safety. You can contact him at alevenfeld@rocketfuel.com