by Laurie Sullivan @lauriesullivan, April 5, 2017

comScore announced late Wednesday that the company will work with Google to provide independent brand safety reporting of advertising campaigns on YouTube.

The move follows weeks of criticism by advertisers complaining that Alphabet’s subsidiaries — Google and YouTube — did not do enough to stop appropriate non-search ads from serving up next to inappropriate videos and content on YouTube and publisher sites.

comScore notes that Google will use a “proprietary brand safety engine” built into its Campaign Essentials suite of tools that will validate and monitor patterns and text that identifies content. It aims to prevent brand advertisements from serving up on terrorism-related pages.

“Monitoring online content for brand safety is a complex challenge, particularly in an environment that has the vast scale and growth of YouTube,” said Dan Hess, executive vice president of products at comScore, in a statement. “We’re delighted to see Google taking further action to monitor and increase brand safety, and appreciate its vote of confidence in selecting comScore to be part of this initiative.”

Earlier this week, Randall Rothenberg, the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s president and CEO, wrote in a post that it’s time to clean up the digital supply chain. While he referred to a variety of pitfalls such as pirated copyrighted entertainment and falsified content, the statement to “demand a clear digital advertising supply chain” also applies to cleaning up the derogatory content serving up next to branded content on YouTube and publisher sites.

MediaPost.com: Search Marketing Daily

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