Auric Adames, Senior Product Manager — Media Filter, shares use cases for the Ad Sentry click-to-block creative gallery that will sound very familiar.
It’s one of publisher ad ops’ recurring nightmares—waking up Saturday morning to a furious consumer email: “I just saw the most offensive ad ever on your site!”
If you’re lucky, the complaint contains a screenshot of the ad creative, but no other data that could help you identify the ad, the source campaign, or ad tech vendor—things like URL, SSP name, creative ID, call chain, ad markup, etc. So the next logical step is for the ad ops team to load page after page after page in hopes of discovering the objectionable ad and retrieving relevant details so it can be shut down.
They refresh, refresh, and refresh some more, jumping from content area to content area like a search party combing a vast forest. The offending ad might pop up after a while and the team can place it on a blocklist or take steps to shut the campaign down. But they may just never find it in the deluge of ad impressions that rain down on digital media properties.
Either way, that’s a lot of stress and wasted time spent looking for a needle in a haystack. Surely there’s a better way to track down an unwanted ad?
Click to Block
Media Filter’s Ad Sentry creative gallery is a central repository of ads harvested from publisher properties with sensitive, potentially objectionable, and/or regulated content.
Now when consumers, editorial, or executives come crying about an offensive ad, the ad ops team can turn to Ad Sentry and rifle through creatives in 40+ categories of sensitive ad content. The ads are identified using The Media Trust’s AI-driven Ad Categorization platform, used by major SSPs and DSPs to flag sensitive and regulated ad content at scale.
Without necessarily needing a screenshot of the offending ad, just an idea of the content, ad ops can find the corresponding category—e.g., Adult, Alcohol, CBD, Clickbait, Crypto, Gambling, Political, Medical and more. Once the culprit is identified, the team simply clicks “block” to ensure it never runs on a publisher’s sites and apps again.
Most important, you can view the ad markup and call chain, which should contain all the information needed to determine where the ad came from, and address the issue at the source (e.g., SSP, DSP, Ad Exchange, etc.). This is key to developing better relationships with your demand partners (and their partners) so you receive advertising that complies with your publisher brand safety policies—and can cut down on your creative blocking!
By hitting “view” on a creative’s tag in Ad Sentry, you can decipher source and call chain information.
Empowering Nuance
The value of Ad Sentry goes well beyond hunting down random offensive creatives. While Media Filter’s category-level blocking is a powerful tool, Ad Sentry offers a precision-based alternative that empowers publishers to enact nuanced policies when it comes to sensitive ad content.
For example, political advertising can be very lucrative for publisher revenue efforts, but an increasingly acrimonious political landscape (especially in the US) means more ads with inflammatory rhetoric and images are appearing across the digital media landscape. Ad Sentry can be used to pinpoint ads that violate a publisher’s standards or veer in content directions it considers brand unsafe—e.g., certain rhetoric around abortion rights and immigration.
The same is true for complicated content verticals like CBD/Hemp, Cryptocurrency, Gambling, Marijuana, and even Medical and Pharmaceutical. Ad Sentry offers publishers far greater control over the ads that are coming in through indirect channels. And of course Media Filter’s ad replacement technology makes sure they can still monetize their inventory while keeping unwanted ads out.
Ad Sentry’s precision blocking bolsters Media Filter’s standing as a truly holistic real-time ad quality solution. To learn more about how Media Filter can protect consumers and your publisher brand, reach out here.
