14 DAY TRIAL // Following up on its promise to bring in third-party companies to offer brand safety reports, Google has chosen comScore.
Google is currently involved in a major scandal due to bad ad placement that has seen some 250 businesses halting their collaboration with Google due to fears that their brands would become associated with extremist or hateful content on YouTube.
The company has promised to start using Machine Learning to better spot the offensive content, but also to bring in other companies to provide independent brand safety reporting of ad campaigns.
comScore uses a proprietary brand safety engine that is integral to its validated Campaign Essentials suite. In short, the technology monitors patterns within text content to identify the brand safety of a given ad context.
"Monitoring online content for brand safety is a complex challenge, particularly in an environment that has the vast scale and growth of YouTube," said Dan Hess, executive vice president of products at comScore. "We're delighted to see Google taking further action to monitor and increase brand safety, and appreciate its vote of confidence in selecting comScore to be part of this initiative."
Fixing the problem
Google is moving fast to fix the problems it is facing. It was just late last week that it announced it would start working with companies that are MRC-accredited for ad verification for its new initiative, and now they're already coming out with the announcement.
Philipp Schindler, the company's chief business officer, recently said that Google wasn't suffering too much due to the boycott. He also added that it was only "very very very small numbers" of ads running alongside questionable content.
This indicates that while Google's monetary gain may not suffer too much right now, it does fear a PR backlash, preferring to bring some quick solutions rather than wait out for the scandal to blow over.
On top of all these measures already announced by Google, the company will also work on shortening the time it takes to review flagged videos, exclude specific content from where their ads could appear, and change the default level of brand safety for where ads can appear.