Online video has the undisputed numbers to attract advertisers, now it needs to inspire the confidence to seal the deal. To that end, video advertising technology company YuMe today announced that it has added brand security capabilities to its ACE technology platform. 

The new capabilities leverage YuMe’s proprietary domain detection technology, which can collect detailed information about the in-page environment of a syndicated or embeddable player when it makes an ad request, even when the player is not associated with a companion banner.  This allows YuMe to prevent ads from running in video players that have been embedded on inappropriate websites, and to work with publishers to constantly monitor and improve the list of sites where their syndicated and user-embeddable players are appearing.

“The majority of online video publishers—including some of the biggest media companies in the world—have chosen to syndicate their premium online video content and to offer user-embeddable video players, and we want to be able to reach these online video audiences while keeping our customers’ brands safe” said Jonathan Nelson, CEO of Omnicom Digital.  “We are pleased that YuMe has chosen to make an ongoing investment in brand security, combining regular monitoring and research with proactive technology to prevent inappropriate impressions before they happen.”

The new capabilities are comprised of two main features. The first is domain blacklisting: recognizing and preventing inappropriate impressions. YuMe maintains a constantly growing blacklist of over 1.5 million domains that contain inappropriate content.  When YuMe receives an ad request from a video player, it uses its domain detection capabilities to confirm that the player is not embedded on a blacklisted domain before serving an ad.

 The second is syndication quality scores: working with publishers to protect brands.  Using a proprietary algorithm, YuMe assigns a syndication quality score to each YuMe publisher, based on how well ads served into its syndicated players perform for advertisers, and on whether the publisher has ever requested an ad for a player on an inappropriate domain.  YuMe manually reviews every site that a YuMe publisher claims as an authorized syndication partner to ensure that they meet YuMe’s quality standards, and creates a formal list of syndication domains for every publisher.  If a publisher makes an ad request from a new domain that is not on YuMe’s blacklist, that domain is flagged for review by YuMe’s staff.  YuMe closely monitors its publishers’ syndication quality scores, and regularly encourages publishers to offer greater campaign performance to advertisers by removing their players from lower-performing domains.