Home TV IAS Is Plugging Brand Safety And Suitability Measurement For Google Video Partners Inventory

IAS Is Plugging Brand Safety And Suitability Measurement For Google Video Partners Inventory

SHARE:
Measuring tape - concept illustration for body ideals. Easy to replace numbers with your own. B&W decorative design element.

A few weeks ago, no one was talking about YouTube’s ad network. Some ad buyers didn’t even know that the product, called Google Video Partners (GVP), existed.

But it’s squarely on their radar now, thanks to a recent report published by independent research firm Adalytics. It found that the majority of ad spend against TrueView placements on GVP inventory appears in low-quality, auto-play, sound-off environments. (TrueView is YouTube’s proprietary cost-per-view ad unit.)

According to Integral Ad Science, however, GVP’s existence was never a secret.

The IAS reporting dashboard includes information about the number of impressions served against GVP inventory. IAS has offered viewability and invalid traffic measurement for GVP since 2016, although there wasn’t a tool for measuring brand safety and suitability.

Safety and suitability

Which put IAS in an awkward spot, since many advertisers do feel hoodwinked by YouTube.

“I was a bit surprised that advertisers were surprised,” said Craig Ziegler, SVP of product management at IAS. “Advertisers were aware enough of GVP to demand more transparency from us, which is something we’ve been working on.”

Ziegler is referring to a new capability that IAS added to its media quality offering on Friday to measure brand safety and suitability for off-YouTube sites and apps through GVP. (DoubleVerify, Google’s other brand safety partner, doesn’t yet have an analogous tool.)

“This is a progression of our joint road map,” Ziegler said. “Since the beginning of our partnership with Google, we’ve continuously evolved our measurement capabilities and expanded the types of inventory and placements we measure.”

The offering, which was in beta for the past few months, analyzes any video ads, including TrueView, that extend to the GVP network.

Google signals to IAS whether an ad is served on a GVP app or site, he said. Campaign delivery data is then shared with IAS through Ads Data Hub (ADH), Google’s cloud-based ad server data repository.

Subscribe

AdExchanger Daily

Get our editors’ roundup delivered to your inbox every weekday.

From there, IAS uses natural language processing to assess the content for brand safety and suitability based on the framework created by the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), which sets standard definitions for high-, medium- and low-risk content.

IAS, however, does not suggest that Google remove publishers from GVP. If advertisers don’t like what they see, Ziegler said they can take action to exclude specific sites or apps from their campaigns.

“This is about transparency,” Ziegler said. “Marketers make the decision themselves whether something is OK for their brand.”

Work in progress

But there are still open questions about the value of GVP and how it’s measured.

According to IAS, only 3.4% of TrueView impressions run on GVP inventory, while 7% of overall video placements include GVP inventory. DoubleVerify says GVP represents 3% of its monitored impressions.

The Adalytics report, meanwhile, found somewhere between 50% and 90% of TrueView skippable in-stream budgets were being served on GVP rather than YouTube O&O.

It’s difficult to reconcile these numbers.

“All I can comment on is the data we put out there,” Ziegler said. “That’s the data we see.”

The MRC question

But what about ads that could be seen but not heard?

One of the main issues Adalytics uncovered is that many TrueView ads served via GVP were muted, outstream ad formats. Although IAS rates GVP for viewability, it doesn’t yet measure for audibility. It’s on the road map.

“We’re expanding into other types of measurements,” Ziegler said, “audibility being one of them.”

It’s important to note, however, that none of these offerings are accredited by the Media Rating Council, and there is still fuzziness about what it means to offer independent third-party measurement in this context.

Although Google has MRC accreditation for first-party data collection and transmission with third parties through ADH, the review doesn’t extend to inventory off YouTube. No third-party measurement provider has MRC accreditation for GVP.

The MRC is aware that third-party vendors have started receiving GVP data from Google. Its expectation, said Ron Pinelli, SVP of digital research and standards, is that any GVP data shared through ADH “is segregated and disclaimed as unaccredited.”

“We are working to confirm this,” Pinelli said. “We do not consider this third-party direct independent measurement and note it on our site as third-party reporting and in our accreditation letters as independent third-party calculation and reporting.”

An IAS spokesperson is not planning to pursue MRC accreditation for GVP measurement at this time, but the company is “evaluating our options.”

Must Read

A comic depicting Judge Leonie Brinkema's view of the her courtroom where the DOJ vs. Google ad tech antitrust trial is about to begin. (Comic: Court Is In Session)

Your Day One Recap: DOJ vs. Google Goes Deep Into The Ad Tech Weeds

It’s not often one gets to hear sworn witnesses in federal court explain the intricacies of header bidding under oath. But that’s what happened during the first day of the Google ad tech-focused antitrust case in Virginia on Monday.

Comic: What Else? (Google, Jedi Blue, Project Bernanke)

Project Cheat Sheet: A Rundown On All Of Google’s Secret Internal Projects, As Revealed By The DOJ

What do Hercule Poirot, Ben Bernanke, Star Wars and C.S. Lewis have in common? If you’re an ad tech nerd, you’ll know the answer immediately.

shopping cart

The Wonderful Brand Discusses Testing OOH And Online Snack Competition

Wonderful hadn’t done an out-of-home (OOH) marketing push in more than 15 years. That is, until a week ago, when it began a campaign across six major markets to promote its new no-shell pistachio packs.

Privacy! Commerce! Connected TV! Read all about it. Subscribe to AdExchanger Newsletters
Google filed a motion to exclude the testimony of any government witnesses who aren’t economists or antitrust experts during the upcoming ad tech antitrust trial starting on September 9.

Google Is Fighting To Keep Ad Tech Execs Off the Stand In Its Upcoming Antitrust Trial

Google doesn’t want AppNexus founder Brian O’Kelley – you know, the godfather of programmatic – to testify during its ad tech antitrust trial starting on September 9.

How HUMAN Uncovered A Scam Serving 2.5 Billion Ads Per Day To Piracy Sites

Publishers trafficking in pirated movies, TV shows and games sold programmatic ads alongside this stolen content, while using domain cloaking to obscure the “cashout sites” where the ads actually ran.

In 2019, Google moved to a first-price auction and also ceded its last look advantage in AdX, in part because it had to. Most exchanges had already moved to first price.

Thanks To The DOJ, We Now Know What Google Really Thought About Header Bidding

Starting last week and into this week, hundreds of court-filed documents have been unsealed in the lead-up to the Google ad tech antitrust trial – and it’s a bonanza.