Brand safety concerns once plagued digital display and online video inventory. They have been somewhat soothed by brand safety software.

But, as conected TV rises, some of the same concerns are arriving on TV now.

CTV hits prime-time

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Matt Duffy of Pixability, a vendor of brand safety tooling for YouTube and other platforms, describes how the category is evolving.

Duffy points to a study from Global Alliance for Responsible Media and data from Comscore showing how comfortable advertisers have become with those channels.

“It showed (that) YouTube is now over 99% brand-safe for advertisers,” he says. “According to Comscore, over 40% of CTV watch time is YouTube.”

And Pixability just commissioned its own survey of ad buyer attitudes to brand safety in connected TV.

Duffy summarized some of the results.

Buyers look beyond

“(Respondents) don’t see CTV as a brand suitability threat or safety threat … Their concern is reach and driving full-funnel results on CTV,” he explains.

But Duffy says it’s not that simple – “safety” may be built-in, but “suitability” of content is a different matter.

“CTV content sometimes may have nudity or violence and so forth,” he says. “And it may also express certain opinions that a brand may not want to be aligned with.

“Although YouTube is safe, there are specific suitability issues that some of your advertisers may have with.”

From threat to opportunity

Pixability’s clients include the “big six agencies” plus smaller independents and some brands as well,

Duffy says the same kind of vendors that offer “brand safety” technology can also help out with “suitability”, the alignment of ads to inventory in an expanding CTV universe. “No-one wants one and not the other,” he says.

In fact, Duffy thinks the ‘brand safety” threat has reached the point of becoming an opportunity.

“Suitability has always been a little bit about defence and avoiding content you don’t want,” he says. “(But) it can be also thought of as an offensive measure – go on the offence and find content that performs well.

“We’re seeing a great trend towards agencies and brands embracing that and saying, ‘Yes, it’s not as much about avoiding content as it is about finding content that helps us perform better’.

Defense to offense

Companies like Pixability aim to turn video content into metadata signals, surfaced in buying platforms, that ad buyers can leverage or swerve. They are enabling the new wave of “contextual” video ad targeting.

Previously, Pixability released a tool for automating analyses of what specific video iterations are working or not. The system uses machine learning to evaluate the different versions of the uploaded ads while measuring their performance, context and audience against the client’s KPIs.

“We’ve created curated lists around different causes that people want to support or types of creators that people want to support,” Duffy adds. “We have LGBTQ creator lists, we have black and Asian creator lists, et cetera.

“So it’s a really nice trend to see suitability, not just as a preventative measure, but as a way to connect with creators that you want to support.”

You are watching “Driving Reach and Results on Connected TV,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Pixability. For more videos, please visit this page.

Case in point – the ability to target ads in CTV also creates new management tasks around the traditional TV ad “pod”.

That is according to one seasoned video ad-tech exec. In this video interview with Beet.TV,  Mike Baker, who co-founded dataxu and then sold it to Roku last year, discusses the approaches that need to be taken.

The commercial break

Baker says differences in the way linear and connected TV manage commercial breaks sometimes leave CTV needing improvement.

“The ad pod is well-managed in linear TV environments (but), due to the way the CTV plumbing works … repetitive ads can sort of pour into the same ad pod,” he says.

He blames factors like app engineering, stream encoding, app makers’ decisions, broadcaster factors and splits on inventory often conflicting.

As a solution, he advocates a “standardized taxonomy” for ads, Ad-ID, being brought to CTV, “so we can have a better consumer experience”.

Beyond spots

It’s bigger than plumbing, however.

Baker hails work being done at companies like Hulu and Roku to go beyond the traditional interstitial commercial break experience, “with more creative integrations into the viewer experience”, and work from outfits like IRIS TV and Pixability which crunch YouTube videos to make descriptive signals that describe their inner content.

Baker joined the board of Pixability in March 2020 after his dataxu was sold to Roku for $150 million. The company aims to increase brand suitability for YouTube ad buyers – something Baker says is important since a growing proportion of YouTube viewing is now carried out on TV sets.

In fact, Nielsen Streaming Meter says, of the 25% of TV time spent with streaming video, 20% goes to YouTube, making it the second-most-watched digital video platform after Netflix.

Accordingly, YouTube’s CTV ad revenue is growing fast.

Behold, the contextual graph?

All of which makes the efficacy of YouTube ad sales all the more important.

Companies like Pixability and IRIS TV aim to turn video content into metadata signals, surfaced in buying platforms, that ad buyers can leverage or swerve. They are enabling the new wave of “contextual” video ad targeting.

“Companies like dataxu were innovators in creating a consumer data graph,” Baker says of his old firm.

“But I think it’s time for a context graph and not just for Google to create its federated learning of cohorts. Really, everybody should be working on how the creative fit of the advertising and the content go together.”

You are watching “Driving Reach and Results on Connected TV,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Pixability. For more videos, please visit this page.

But now YouTube is the number-two streaming media platform on TVs and amongst the largest beneficiaries of connected TV advertising spend.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Pixability advisor and former Dunkin’ CMO Tony Weisman charts YouTube’s rise – and why it is so important to marketers today.

The small acorn

Weisman, who was also CEO for DigitasLBi in North America, reminisces about early YouTube NewFront presentations, when the platform was simultaneously education ad buyers and trying to win their spending commitments.

“Nobody even thought about having YouTube as part of it,” Weisman recalls. “The next thing you know, it became sort of the tent pole of NewFront week.”

Still, it nevertheless took buyers a little time to understand YouTube’s unique proposition.

“We met these creators who most of us had never heard of,” Weisman says. “And then we’d go outside, and there were literally thousands of largely teens waiting outside because word had spread that had creator they loved was there.

“It was an ‘a-ha’ moment for me that these creators were going to be able to command huge audiences and, as a result, massive advertising budgets. And that they had tapped into an audience that most of us were seeking for one reason or another but weren’t aware of how to reach.”

CTV gargantuan

That’s all changed now, of course.

Nielsen Streaming Meter says, of the 25% of TV time spent with streaming video, 20% goes to YouTube, making it the second-most-watched digital video platform after Netflix.

Accordingly, YouTube’s CTV ad revenue is growing fast. YouTube is up there with Roku but behind Hulu for taking CTV ad dollars.

YouTube is critical

“YouTube in particular that has gone from being interesting to big, to critical,” Weisman says. “YouTube is a critical component of every media buyer’s buy right now.

“They’ve made enormous strides in searchability and safety in reliability. They’ve done really, really smart things to build the brand and the offerings. It’s no longer a question about whether or not you’re going to invest in YouTube, but are you going to do it smartly?

“Or are you going to do it with somebody who can, you know, who can really make sure that that investment is wise or are you just going to take your chances. And I would not advise anyone to just take their chances.”

You are watching “Driving Reach and Results on Connected TV,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Pixability. For more videos, please visit this page.

Pixablity provides brand suitability tools for marketers buying on YouTube.  The scope of the platforms covered by the company have expanded to include Roku and Amazon.

Atwood explains his company’s  approach which utilizes both machine learning and human intervention.

“We’ve provided the opportunity for people to toe dip into connected TV. So we see that as really a big part of our future,” George says in this interview with Beet.TV at the LUMA Partners Digital Media East conference.

Referred to in some circles as “the trade desk for walled gardens,” Pixability’s foundation is in helping advertisers target audiences within YouTube and Facebook. “We are the only technology platform that has access to what is really the largest video inventory, and we get to leverage the unique capabilities for targeting and so forth on YouTube and Facebook,” George says.

In recent years Pixability has extended its footprint to Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat and Spotify. “Were uniquely positioned at the moment in really what’s a super exciting space.”

During most of his tenure at Facebook, George led the Mobile Publisher Solutions team, which drove rapid growth for Facebook’s Audience Network, according to a Pixability news release. His video software experience includes stints at Celtra, KickApps and Maven Networks, which was acquired by Yahoo.

“Think of us as a tech player that sits on top of the Google stack as well as Facebook.”

Asked about consumer data, George says, “We can leverage first-party data from clients, but it’s less of a challenge because we live within the walled gardens. All the data is available to us.”

As part of the YouTube Measurement Program, Pixability gets access to “a bunch of data that brands will use for insights about the audiences, and it obviously helps us with helping them find their audiences on these platforms.”

One of the company’s main focuses right now is around planning capabilities for targeting down to “micro audiences. That doesn’t exist in the market outside of Pixability.”

“They’ve been our trusted partner for many years and we’re one of their largest partners there,” he says of YouTube. “But now also having a cross-platform story that now will extend into connected TV.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of LUMA Partners’ DIGITAL MEDIA EAST 2019. For more videos from the conference, please visit this page. This series is sponsored by 4INFO.

“A lot of folks refer to us as the trade desk for walled gardens,” says Pixability CEO David George. “The next evolution for us is into OTT or CTV.”

Pixability’s clients include the “big six agencies” plus smaller independents and some brands as well, George explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the annual DMEXCO conference.

The big six “tend to look at YouTube and Facebook in different groups where the independents and brands they really get value around our ability to do cross platform. We provide a lot of efficiencies and scale in that environment because we can move ads and budgets around to different platforms.”

Earlier this month, Pixability released a tool for automating analyses of what specific video iterations are working or not. The system uses machine learning to evaluate the different versions of the uploaded ads while measuring their performance, context and audience against the client’s KPIs, as MediaPost reports.

Part of the reason for Pixability’s presence at DMEXCO is its expansion to international markets. In addition to Boston, Chicago, New York and San Francisco, the company has an office in London.

While video consumption and advertising “is growing exponentially,” says George, what’s really exciting is what’s going on in OTT. I myself recently cut the cord. It’s a liberating experience.”

This interview is part of a series titled Advertising Reimagined: The View from DMEXCO 2018, presented by Criteo. Please find more videos from the series here.

The Pixability story is concise: Many advertisers don’t want the lion’s share of their video ad dollars going to Facebook, Google and very few others, but they have no choice because of the audiences they need to reach. However, they shouldn’t do it on their own.

“You have to see that if you make a direct buy, it’s essentially a fox in the henhouse approach. You’re grading your own homework,” Hein says of the walled gardens themselves in an interview with Beet.TV.

What is supposed to make Pixability the caretaker of the hens is that its platform places ads on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube—the latter since 2008—and thus has deep audience targeting insights across the quartet. And Hein, who is CEO and Founder, says her company has the ear of those who own the gardens because it works closely with them.

“We frequently work with them on alpha and betas to sort of influence these large behemoths on behalf of our advertisers and advocate for their needs,” Hein says.

Because Pixability works with some of the largest brands in the world, “We actually get to give that feedback directly to the engineers, the product managers and help them understand what a brand needs when they do video advertising.”

Hein explains the reasons why walled gardens have increasingly become the place to go for marketers. “Their audience is moving away from television,” Hein says. “Their audience is annoyed by video on the open web.”

So the walled garden platforms win because they are well policed, there’s not a lot of fraud and viewability is high, according to Hein. “The brands don’t necessarily want to give 100% of every new digital dollar to Facebook or Google, but they understand that’s where their audience is,” she says.

Without citing specific companies, Hein says Pixability is expanding into more social media platforms. “We also see the possibilities in OTT, for example. Our customers are interested in that,” says Hein. “Everywhere young audiences are migrating is what’s interesting for Pliability because we represent those brands that need to find those audiences.”

We interviewed her last month at the Progress Partners Connect conference. Our coverage of the conference is sponsored by Simpli.fi. More videos from the series can be found on this page.