‘The content side of the equation has become a lot more important in the last few years,” Mike Henry, chief executive of contextual analytics firm OpenSlate, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “Three or four years ago, people were primarily thinking about identifying the user that they want to get in front of. Content become more important as the opportunity to individually target users became under threat with the deprecation of cookies and unique identifiers in phones.”
His company started with a focus on helping marketers to identify quality content for ad placements on video-sharing site YouTube. OpenSlate has expanded to other platforms including Facebook, TikTok and Twitter as advertisers seek consumers whose media appetite includes influencers and creators.
“The original idea remains the focus for the company, which is….advertising is going to run a lot more places in the future than it has in the past,” Henry said. “We started not with brand safety or suitability, but with quality – understanding that advertisers would try to compare the content that’s on a platform like YouTube with content that’s on television.”
Many major companies have been mindful of their broader responsibilities to society for years. However, the past couple of years of the coronavirus pandemic, protests against racism and growing awareness of fake news have pushed more advertisers to scrutinize the digital content they support. OpenSlate has been able to show that consumers are much more likely to pay attention to ads that are within content that’s relevant to them.
“Advertisers can’t just let algorithms determine where they’re going to run,” Henry said. “They need to be involved in the decision about where their ads are running and what content they’re supporting.”
OpenSlate plans to expand to more media outlets to help its clientele to better track the effectiveness of their cross-platform campaigns.
“Ultimately, our goals is to measure all ad-supported content with the same set of metrics,” Henry said.
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]]>OpenSlate’s Slate Score measures content quality, whilst the company also charts videos’ subject matter expertise and brand safety.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, CEO Mike Henry says the company also plans to rate other videos offered by premium publishers.
“We started with YouTube, we expanded into Facebook earlier this year,” says Henry. “We’ll be announcing more platforms soon.
“We’re certainly interested in other platforms where people are watching video. Once you get beyond the (big) platforms, we’re interested in all ad-supported video.”
Henry says the interest in tracking new video destinations is “being driven by our clients”.
“Big brands like Proctor & Gamble and Unilever want to understand where they should be and where they shouldn’t be on those platforms,” he says. “They want to understand the differences between something they might buy on YouTube or Facebook and something they might buy on CBS or Hulu. So over time, our vision is ubiquity and a consistent set of metrics for all online video.”
OpenSlate provides data about the content, subject matter and suitability of more than 600 million YouTube and Facebook videos for advertisers to determine whether the inventory is a good fit for their brand.
It is one of a growing plethora of “brand safety” tools aiming to give ad buyers more control.
Last month, Nielsen invested to acquire a minority stake in OpenSlate. – a move Henry says “adds some power and promise to that vision” The deal puts the valuation of OpenSlate at $100 million, the Wall Street Journal reported based on its sources.
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