Content verification firm Project Sunblock aims to keep customers’ online adverts away from damaging or incongruous content, and has just updated its solution. The business claims the issue costs £2.5bn a year and affects 7.78 billion ads annually.
COO Andrew Goode talks to CBR about what the new tool offers and why the London-based firm is targeting Europe.
Project Sunblock sets out to solve the problem of companies’ adverts appearing alongside damaging content, such as porn or file-sharing sites. How much of a problem is this for firms and why has it come about?
There’s billions of sites globally that are seeking advertising spend. There’s also brands seeking to get themselves out to the widest audiences they can. It becomes impractical to reach out to every site and work out which ones are best, so it’s done through a system where any intermediaries can bid [via ad exchanges] to send out the company’s adverts.
In the end, to keep costs low and reach as many people as possible, companies make compromises and those mean they get less control over exactly where adverts will appear. That means they can end up in all sorts of funny places.
It ranges from the comical to the serious. You can have high street brand names advertising against sites offering illegal movie downloads, or telecoms offering a broadband product next to file-sharing sites. None of those happen intentionally, it’s just part of the fundamental process of placing online ads, but it can cause huge reputational damage for brands.
Let’s say you visit a car site looking at a car. Its manufacturer will drop a cookie on your computer and next time you end up on a site on the intermediary’s list they will put an ad on for that car, but they won’t know what kind of site you’re on.
But how do illegal sites and other ones like porn end up being listed?
Illegal sites often self-categorise, so they can call the site something legal and pretend it’s fine. In certain cases they will be given a category but things like pornography are not acknowledged as grey areas, so they are just made available.
So how does Project Sunblock set out to tackle this issue?
We’ve achieved ABC [Audit Bureau of Circulations] accreditation and we’re recognised as the only tool able to react to real-time changes in page content. The standard way we work is by using IBM’s global filter database to check the full page of a URL against various categories, then against other filters our client has determined.
That leads our software to make a decision on whether the page is appropriate for the ad or not and that’s all done in under three milliseconds.
You had a funding round in July, raising a seven-figure sum. How much of that went into your product update, and what does that update involve?
One of things we needed to do this year was invest heavily in our tool and make it faster, better performance, more efficient and add a bunch of new features. Nearly all the money we raised went on doing that.
Certain things have happened, including pre-bid vetting. That’s when you buy through an ad exchange under a bidding system, and you don’t know what you’ll get until the bid’s accepted. They can make all kinds of claims but you don’t get to believe it until you’ve bought it.
So with pre-bid vetting, before that bid’s accepted we will have a look at what you’re buying and if the sites offered don’t meet the criteria the client wants, we’ll reject the bid.
Also there’s a question of effectiveness. If your ads were all seen but only seen for on average one second, is that a good use of your spend?
We looked at geolocations, so where in the world views are coming from, and we looked at things like fraud-bot detection, looking at have you actually got real people visiting the sites your ads are on?
Lastly, you’re a London-based company and you recently opened offices in Germany too. What’s your market strategy for the near future – are you more interested in Europe than the US?
Our aim originally was to focus on Europe because we’re the only UK-based content verification tool of scale. Our main competitors are American and they focus on the US.
Europe has been an afterthought for them and that was our opportunity. It’s a European product for Europeans and we’re in talks to open up in France. There’s a desire in these countries that because their brands are global and as the internet doesn’t really take borders into account, they all have the same advertising needs.
