DoubleVerify has made its Brand Suitability Tiers, which identify and profile the content that is safe for brands to run ads alongside, available for advertisers and publishers providing additional safety for publishers and advertisers.

The company’s brand safety and suitability solution was first announced in November 2020. 

Brand suitability has evolved in the past 18 months. Brands and publishers are paying more attention. “Brands have realized brand suitability is part of a flexible and nuanced toolkit,” said Dan Slivjanovski, CMO at DoubleVerify. “The more granular and specific, the more nuanced they can be in terms of what they want to avoid, the better.”

When there is an emerging event, such as an attack on the Capitol building, DoubleVerify can identify and assign new topics — from politics to crime or violence — to insert into categories as part of the company’s semantic engine.

“High-risk content in the category of crime might be unmoderated, user-generated content that promotes how to conduct a crime or break into a house,” said Matt McLaughlin, COO of DoubleVerify. “Medium risk might be dramatic depiction of crime, but professionally done. Low risk might be how to prevent a crime done by an academic organization.”

The 4A’s Advertising Protection Bureau (APB) and World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) have created guidelines to strengthen current brand safety and suitability practices and develop a common language for advertisers and publishers. Brand suitability is placed in three tiers of risk: low, medium, and high.

Brand Suitability Tiers aim to give advertisers and publishers a better set of controls. A clear definition forges a clear alignment between the two.

For advertisers, DoubleVerify’s Brand Suitability Tiers offer 13 categories of content determined by type and topic. This approach classifies the content and lets brands exercise more refined avoidance strategies while preserving campaign scale.

For publishers, Brand Suitability Tiers provide access to the data and insights they need to analyze inventory and optimize campaign performance relative to suitability. DoubleVerify today serves more than 110 publishers.

McLaughlin says the brand suitability controls are also available for use with Facebook. When an advertiser runs an in-stream video or instant article on Facebook, they can use a similar set of controls.