DoubleVerify on Brand Safety Evolution Beyond 2018

Viant’s Q & A series shines a spotlight on the biggest challenges, questions, and trends in the programmatic marketplace with commentary from industry experts, clients, and partners.

Today’s Q & A is with Steven Woolway, SVP of Business Development at DoubleVerify. Founded in 2008, DoubleVerify is a leading provider of brand safety solutions to help brands and agencies authenticate the quality and effectiveness of their digital media.

As SVP of Business Development, Woolway is responsible for expanding DoubleVerify’s alliances with digital media and tech partners.

Q: How do you think brand safety will evolve in 2018?

Implementing a comprehensive brand safety strategy has become table stakes for global advertisers. Advertisers expect that their media investment is protected across all channels – including the social media platforms – and all devices at a global level.

We’re making strong headway in bringing the comprehensive brand safety solutions we’re accustomed to in the desktop and mobile world into the social media landscape, and we see those capabilities evolving and expanding over time.

In bridging these channels, we’re able to provide advertisers a holistic brand safety approach no matter where their media runs.

Q: Is there one aspect of brand safety that that all marketers should be thinking about?

It’s critical that advertisers and their agencies invest the time to craft a brand safety solution that’s custom-fit to the sensitivities of the brand and requirements of the campaign. Given that brand safety is defined at the brand level and not one-size-fits-all, each advertiser needs to take control and build out a unique brand safety profile that protects the interests of the brand while also meeting the scalability goals of the campaign.

Q: What about the evolution of viewability and ad fraud this year?

Viewability has been established as a currency in the industry, however advertisers increasingly want to go beyond the view, including looking at more advanced metrics such as how a user engages with viewable ads. Beyond that, we are seeing a trend of advertisers looking to leverage viewability data in a broader way across overall campaign measurement and attribution.

As more dollars shift into digital, we have seen fraud schemes grow in sophistication and sheer volume, with a proliferation of in-app fraud. DV was recently accredited by the MRC for SIVT detection and blocking in mobile apps, and our innovation around mobile fraud continues to expose the risks that advertisers face unless they are using a leading fraud prevention solution.

Q: Are you seeing marketers and agencies develop custom viewability metrics? What are the upsides and potential downsides of custom metrics?

As I mentioned earlier, viewability has become a core component of a media buy and sophisticated advertisers are adopting refined definitions of a view to meet their internal business objectives. DoubleVerify provides support for these custom viewability metrics and we believe we will see more introduced going forward.  Diving in deeper to custom viewability, DV provides advertisers with a unique metric called Key Message Exposure, allowing an advertiser to craft KPIs around the exposure of critical areas of the advertisement, counting the view only when the logo or call-to-action was in view or audible. By leveraging rich data and understanding what KPIs have the greatest impact on conversion, brands will continue to refine these custom metrics and will need partners like DoubleVerify to support them.

Q: Anything exciting on the horizon?

Mobile will continue to drive growth in the industry as consumers increasingly rely on smartphones and tablets to manage the bulk of their online needs. I anticipate more exciting rollouts of mobile-supported targeting solutions from DoubleVerify this year.
 
Further, we continue to respond to our client needs, which largely boils down to ensuring we’re providing the same level of protection and measurement no matter the channel where the investment is made. As part of that we’re also investing in emerging channels such as OTT and connected TV as we see more media investment shift to those channels.  

We’re also excited about our addition of DoubleVerify’s pre-bid viewability and brand safety targeting. You can read more about this here.