The tectonic media shift has begun -  automated purchases of media advertising are capturing the market. On the one hand, it’s a good trend, on the other hand, there are greater risks connected with it - your advertising might appear in an inappropriate context and it is necessary to urgently protect your brand against ad fraud. The companies are forced to respond quickly and use new technologies so as not to lose the market.

Now such a trend is considered programmatic purchases - the automated placement of targeted Internet advertising. More and more world famous giants have already made their choice in favor of programmatic advertising. For example, Procter & Gamble announced its intention to translate up to 75% of online advertising in programmatic by the end of this year. American Express, one of the top 10 US advertisers, also plans to fully switch to the placement of online media advertising through programmatic in the next few years, Unilever or Hyundai allocate a separate line in their annual plan to deliberately programmatic.

Programmatic frees the advertiser (or his agency) from the labor-intensive process of purchasing virtual “advertising spaces”. In a blink of an eye, the system finds the users most interesting to the customer, and shows them a personal banner, video or push message in the mobile application.

Automation, very accurate targeting and detailed statistics - that’s what attracts big brands in programmatic. Programmatic platforms cover several channels and tens of thousands of sites, but advertising is not tied to the site, but to the user, so restricting the list of sites makes the campaign ineffective. Moreover, the premium site does not guarantee “proper” placement: the text of the article on the site may not be appropriate in combination with a specific banner. In an unsuccessful environment, a banner can appear for just a few users, but large brands and large budgets do not like accidents. A typical example of an unsuccessful placement  -  the advertisement of the tour to Greece adjoins a note about battles with the police in Athens.

Brand protection in programmatic

Brand safety technology allows to protect the brand with automatic purchases at a new level and demonstrates how to elevate programmatic advertising. Algorithms are a more effective monitoring tool than viewing all the pages where a potential customer sees the banner manually. Programmatic-platforms in this case use the same technologies as search engines to ensure that the pages correspond to the request of the visitor. To understand what content contains a page and to which category it can be attributed, automated analysis of semantics and image recognition is applied. Understanding the content of sites, the advertising platform can:

- divide the sites into categories and filter out those with negative content. This can also include those sites that the media planner would approve in the “manual mode”, being unaware that fraud ads or infringing information is hidden in one of the subdomains or internal sections of the site.

- edit dynamically updated content such as forums, news feeds, blogs and assign it to one or another category.

- exclude pages whose content will harm the advertiser in combination with the banner, even if the topic of the resource and the page is formally suitable for the tasks and the audience.

Today all the largest Canadian and American advertising platforms primarily explain how they filter the content in beginning of their presentation. This is the first question asked by an advertiser who understands how everything works.

The inflow of large budgets stimulates the development of technologies, which first of all will have to solve the problems of large advertisers: security and control of placements, fraud risk and access to premium formats (video and rich media).

As a result, the award will be given to those platforms that will be able to build the most advanced technology, know how to elevate programmatic advertising and prove its effectiveness.