Video advertising platform Pixability started out helping advertisers contextualize their digital video buys on YouTube to make sure they ran in brand-safe environments.
But now that consumers are watching more YouTube on TV screens than on web browsers, Pixability is expanding its brand suitability metrics to apply more broadly to CTV environments.
On Wednesday, Pixability announced a new contextual targeting tool that scores CTV content on genre and brand suitability based on frame-by-frame program analysis.
The new tool is an extension of Pixability’s existing brand suitability rating product for YouTube content that brings show-level transparency to CTV, including programmatic, Chief Product Officer Jackie Paulino told AdExchanger.
Concern about brand safety and suitability is one of the main reasons why CTV buyers are demanding media transparency with proverbial pitchforks.
Taming the Tube
Not all advertisers are willing to commit dollars to media they don’t know much about.
The media agency Avalanche Media Group, for example, struggles to secure show-level reporting from most CTV tech and measurement vendors, said CEO Kalyn Asher, so the agency typically opts for direct deals with CTV programmers rather than relying on programmatic partners to ensure inventory quality and brand safety.
Avalanche buys most of its YouTube media through Pixability, Asher said, because the company’s brand suitability ratings are on par with, if not better than, the insights the agency is able to get through direct deals.
Pixability is one of a small group of partners certified by YouTube through its measurement program, giving it access to the data behind YouTube’s user-generated content.
The company analyzes and rates individual YouTube videos based on category, metadata and source (such as whether a video is user-generated) to determine whether they’re brand safe and suitable, and makes that information available to buyers through integrations with Google Ads and DV360.
New horizons
The purpose of Pixability’s new contextual tool is to extend the same episode-level insights into CTV, Paulino said.
Buyers are haranguing publishers for more transparency so they’re able to avoid programming they believe is unsuitable to their brand. Some brands might consider content that features sex or violence to be problematic, for example, and don’t want their ads to appear adjacent to that content.
To try and deal with CTV’s transparency gap, Pixability is also working with contextual video platform IRIS.TV, which ingests and categorizes video-level metadata from CTV publishers and passes that information on to Pixability. Pixability also has direct platform integrations with other publishers, including Roku and Hulu, in addition to a handful of SSP partnerships to reach the longer tail of the CTV market, said Pixability CEO David George.
Pixability then scores content at the episode level for brand suitability based on content taxonomy standards from the IAB and the Global Alliance of Media Responsibility (GARM). This information is made available to advertisers.
Pixability also overlays what it knows about consumption behaviors on YouTube to help model audience viewer preferences into its CTV suitability recommendations, Paulino said.
Although CTV platforms are proliferating, measurement is still faltering.
But marketers should at least be able to ensure that their ads are running against content that aligns with their brand, George said.
