Brand safety isn’t always cut and dried.
An alcohol brand, for instance, might look for content that other brands would instinctively steer clear of. But some media doesn’t leave room for nuance.
On Thursday, Protected by Mediaocean, Mediaocean’s ad verification division, announced a partnership with the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), a nonprofit that identifies and removes online child sexual abuse material (CSAM).
The topic of monetizing and reporting CSAM by ad tech vendors came to a sudden light in February, when Adalytics, an ad verification and analytics startup, identified such content being monetized via programmatic ads.
Amazon, Google, Integral Ad Science, DoubleVerify, the MRC and TAG received letters from Sens. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn), demanding to know how this media slipped through their filters.
The partnership between Mediaocean and IWF aims to “strengthen safeguards in the digital media supply chain,” per the release.
CSAM is a “black and white” category with no room for ambiguity, said Eva Papoutsakis Smith, general manager of demand at Protected by Mediaocean. “Even though we deeply believe that an ad tech partner needs to give the control to their advertising partners,” she added, certain areas, like CSAM, are “complete nonnegotiables.”
Safety first
Even before partnering together, Protected by Mediaocean and the IWF had similar internal processes for screening web pages for unsafe material.
Protected by Mediaocean can serve as an independent verification tool or be used as part of the larger Mediaocean suite, which is integrated with Innovid and Prisma. The tool scans each page for hundreds of signals, such as sentiment, context and user engagement, and then AI models use those insights to determine ad placements and rule out unsuitable inventory.
But the IWF’s system is a bit more hands-on: The IWF emphasizes the importance of keeping humans in the loop, CTO Dan Sexton told AdExchanger. Every piece of media reported to the IWF is assessed by at least one human. If deemed inappropriate, the IWF proceeds to “disrupt” the content as widely as possible, Sexton said.
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If the entire site is dedicated to criminal activity, the IWF might report it to an infrastructure provider like AWS or Cloudflare in an attempt to have the entire site removed. If the content is on a site that isn’t explicitly for harmful purposes but is just “really poorly moderated,” Sexton said, it would request the specific content or URL be removed.
The removal process can be arduous. Once CSAM is identified, there remain a number of complicated hoops before the content can actually be removed. But the IWF has a list of URLs to pages that contain “live CSAM,” said Sexton, which is available to all of its members (among them Meta, Google and Microsoft, and now Protected by Mediaocean) to block access to those pages. The list is updated twice a day.
A shared goal
So if Mediaocean and IWF were already doing comparable work, why join forces?
Simply put, they’re stronger together. The IWF list is a “safety net,” said Papoutsakis Smith. Plus, Mediaocean’s native technology trains on all of the data that integrates with it – including the IWF’s – which strengthens it over time.
“You need as many people as possible to come together and make sure that the technology is strong and the data is sound,” she said.
Unlike most other developments in ad tech, Papoutsakis Smith added, this isn’t an area to compete and stand out; it’s an area that demands “collaboration and consensus.”
“When it’s something as important as [child safety],” she said, “you need a coalition.”
