RhythmOne partners with Grapeshot in bid to shield advertisers

Advertising technology company RhythmOne announced details of its platform-level integration with algorithm software company Grapeshot on Wednesday.

The AIM-traded firm said Grapeshot's data, which would be integrated directly into its own programmatic platform as part of the ‘RhythmGuard’ technology, gives it the ability to “effectively filter” content that brands would consider to be objectionable.

Grapeshot built an adaptive page-crawling algorithm which could determine both the value of words on a given page, and across all pages previously analysed, making it a “true learning algorithm” that was constantly evolving.

As Grapeshot's service servers were co-located in RhythmOne's data centres, brand safety checks would first happen at bid-request in real-time, which RhythmOne’s board said would ensure questionable content would not even enter the RhythmOne ecosystem.

Also, due to the co-location, the RhythmOne-Grapeshot integration made it easier for all previously un-scored sites to be crawled and scored as soon as they entered the ecosystem, thus ensuring that newer sites did not lose out on potential revenue.

“Our unique relationship and integration with RhythmOne is an example of how two leaders within the ad tech ecosystem are working diligently to ensure advertisers can maintain control over the context in which their ads appear," said Grapeshot’s vice-president of platform partnerships, Ryan McBride.

“Integrating in this sophisticated manner gives RhythmOne a leg up over other platforms because, in addition to ensuring that advertisers can access real users, RhythmOne also ensures that they are on contextually appropriate sites that advertisers approve.

“Our partnership demonstrates a level of commitment to brand safety that not all platforms offer.”

Using Grapeshot's scoring, RhythmOne could categorise traffic into four levels of quality - premium, high, low and unsafe.

Unsafe sites were automatically blocked, the board explained, with remaining traffic filtered based on the quality standards of the requesting advertiser.

In addition to blocking all recommended ‘bad’ pages, RhythmOne would go further by blocking all pages that were returned as ‘not crawlable’ or ‘not crawled yet’, taking immediate steps to block even potentially suspicious traffic.

Such standards would help to ensure no questionable traffic was presented to brands for bidding.

RhythmOne would then work closely with publisher partners to ensure content was being crawled, ranked and in good standing.

Additionally, it said Grapeshot also provided benefits on the demand-side.

Through the RhythmOne platform, advertisers could target specific categories or keywords that they wished to include or exclude from their campaigns, facilitating micro-targeting around “very specific” or timely content.

“In a programmatic environment, being able to control for brand safety is as important as being able to eliminate fraud or target to specific viewability standards," said RhythmOne’s head of content Bhaskar Ballapragada.

“Our partnership and deep integration with Grapeshot's technology within our programmatic marketplace is designed to address evolving brand safety concerns and give advertisers peace of mind and control over the context in which their advertising appears.”