Google Gets Another Third-Party AI Brand Safety, Suitability Support | Performance Marketing World August 2024

by Laurie Sullivan @lauriesullivan, Yesterday

Zefr recently announced it has built out support for Google products around AI-Powered Brand Safety and Suitability Verification on YouTube.

The expansion now includes YouTube Shorts inventory, as well as Google’s Demand Gen, and Performance Max campaign products.

Through the Google Ads data hub, the company can now track all the video delivery that ads were served against — either programmatically in Display & Video 360 (DV 360) or Google Ads.

Zefr focuses on brand suitability targeting and measurement for walled gardens.

Andrew Serby, chief commercial officer at Zefr, said there has been a lot of criticism from marketers about the lack of transparency through Performance Max, who need the capability to see where ads serve up.

“It’s a shift away from more traditional programmatic into YouTube Shorts,” he said. 

Transparency becomes critical as the U.S. moves closer to the presidential election. Zefr’s technology can identify content that is fake, fabricated or altered by AI.

The AI finds patterns in video, images, audio and text. AI automates a classification.

If there are hundreds of millions of YouTube videos daily, that’s too many for a person to review. AI classifies the content with Zefr machine-learning models, and the AI uses training data. 

It’s called pattern recognition and pattern matching. Human moderation ensures that the AI remains accurate. 

Humans are still required to monitor output. A report by advertising quality firm Adalytics, reported on by The Drum earlier this month, revealed that ads for hundreds of the world’s biggest brands — including Meta, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble, Amazon, Disney, Nestle, Mercedes, Walmart, Marriott and many others — have appeared online on pages with racial slurs, explicit sexual content and violent imagery.

The publication reviewed more than 50 screenshots of examples produced by Adalytics. In one, an HP ad for a desktop computer appeared next to a wiki page titled ​“Child pornography.” A video ad for Apple’s Safari browser popped up on a page about anal sex, according to The Drum.

Google has a brand-safety reporting program where advertisers can log in through DV360 or Google Ads and find partners to support brand safety and suitability verification. Zefr is one of the partners.