Computer Vision creates new media monetization opportunities

Today’s text-first contextual solutions won’t cut it

The cookie-less environment requires new solutions to reach the right eyes. The general consensus circulating is that the best solution is to substitute contextual targeting for cookies. But the current contextual solutions are lacking the fidelity and accuracy needed to push targeting to its desired state, translating only the text on a page or the text metadata about an image or video. In doing so, these offerings ignore the richest part of the content that can inform effective audience creation: imagery and video.

To create a comprehensive solution, a total-contextual solution is needed that incorporates all available information to develop an accurate audience profile with high fidelity. For example, a marketer may specifically want to target water-skiing. Scanning the text around an article, as done with contextual solutions, is a helpful start if water-skiing is mentioned but overlooks any visual media on the page. Additionally, today’s contextual solutions fail to extract any information from video, a far more powerful, engaging form of content with the highest engagement value. And simply targeting a topic based on texted-based content has its risks. What if the video is, in fact, about a recent water skier’s death, but that information is only evident by scanning the video asset? A water-skiing manufacturer will not want to risk placing ads against this content. A comprehensive solution must also flag any brand-safety risks that are embedded as well.

Netra’s technology provides an all-inclusive solution to comprehend individual text, image, and video channels through its Computer Vision (CV) technology, which scans and provides all page elements, including extracting information from within video content. This information can be used to create an audience-based solution that is far more valuable than today’s contextual solutions.

Monetization opportunities for publishers and other sell-side providers

For publishers and their partners that own media content, total-contextual CV technology creates an opportunity to improve monetization.

How can CV technology improve monetization and deliver premium pricing?:

• Best-in-class audiences: with CV, the information relayed into audience creation is far superior to the text-only contextual targeting offered through current solutions. Moreover, all the richness of video content is included, which provides far more context as every frame within a video contributes to creating highly-reliable and accurate audiences. With CV-based content classification, audience quality is far superior to yesterday’s contextual targeting and can be premium priced.
• A consistent taxonomy: CV creates a consistent taxonomy, allowing for scalable audience offerings. For example, publishers no longer need to be strained by offering inconsistent audiences that are both “water-skiing” (with a hyphen) and “water skiing” (without a hyphen).
• Compatible with Seller-Defined Audiences (SDA): With a consistent taxonomy across all content channels, media owners have the ability to map this taxonomy to other taxonomies such as the IAB’s recent Seller Defined Audiences (SDA).

Benefits for brands and buy-side providers

• Solves for PII concerns while reaching high-target audiences: while also important to publishers, the repercussions of targeting using PII more typically fall on brands. Through an audience-based approach, brands are able to purchase audiences that are generalized based on the content of a page and not the reader’s information. This creates an anonymized solution with audience targeting that incorporates the full, highly x-rayed content within an ad-buying opportunity.
• Buying against a consistent taxonomy: Like the sell-side, buyers also benefit from a consistent taxonomy that allows for scalable buying and campaign planning. Further, buyers are assured of a consistent similarity of likeness within an audience when CV is applied vs. relying on human-based tagging.
• True brand safety: with CV, all frames within a video are scanned for brand-safety risks, rather than relying on text and static imagery which do not consider the brand-safety risks within video content. Only CV assesses the full video asset for true brand safety.
• High-quality analytics to inform campaign targeting: with consistent audience targeting through a reliable similarity of audience development and taxonomy, audience analytics rise as a much more powerful tool to create campaign insights and inform campaign decisions.

Where we go from here

Our vision is to empower the industry to unlock the value within their video assets and provide relief and structured data classification, and purpose-built solutions to harness the massive amount of content created with each hour to turn it into an advantage…

If you are media owner looking to maximize monetization in this period of transition to privacy-first activation, please reach out. We work with some of the biggest names in the industry and would enjoy speaking about how we can support your goals. If you are a brand looking to understand this new environment better, please get in touch. We can forward you to our publisher and vendor clients so you can test the benefits of buying with high fidelity classification with trusted partners.

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