Video intelligence startup Vidooly launches 'Brand Safety Tool' for advertisers

Vidooly, a video intelligence startup on Friday launched a "Brand Safety" tool for advertisers, brands and agencies globally, whereby a brand's ads are displayed over or associated with content that violates the brand guidelines or brand philosophy.

Given that digital ads are managed programmatically and controlled by algorithms, sometimes advertisers may find their brand campaigns associated with content on pornography, hate videos, illegal content and the likes.

Brand Safety has become a major issue worldwide amongst advertisers and major brands have pulled back their digital ad spends in light of this.

This tool, created by the in-house technology team at Vidooly uses a combination of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Big data to examine every pixel of content before an advertiser wants to place their ads in that content. Vidooly already tracks 500 million viewers and 250 million videos across Youtube, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.

Using its massive repository of data on these videos, Vidooly was able to draw on its experience and used deep learning algorithms to understand nature of the content across millions of videos at once.

"In terms of digital ad spends, the rising internet penetration and smartphone adoption has led to a gradual shift from TV and Print. However, due to multiple platforms on digital and lack of standardisation, brands are still wary of going all out with digital video given multiple issues around the same such as "Brand Safety". If you are spending millions of dollars on ads, then you want to make sure that your ads are viewed by the right audience and is associated with the right content. With Vidooly's brand safety tool, we are offering that added level of safety and making sure that the videos on which the ads are served don't cross the brand guidelines," said Subrat Kar, CEO, Vidooly.

While this tool is currently available only for advertisers on Youtube, Vidooly will gradually expand its offerings to other video platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. With this offering, Vidooly hopes to attract advertisers and brands of all sizes and irrespective of their marketing budgets.

According to a study by CII-KPMG, digital advertising in India is expected to cross Rs. 25,500 crore by 2020. In 2016, share of digital spends were only at 12.7 percent and is growing at a CAGR of 33.5 percent annually. Internationally, only about 50 percent of the global population is connected online and India and China have 2.4 billion mobile connections.

Given the untapped opportunity in the emerging markets such as India, advertisers are looking forward to increase their spending, but are cautiously doing so since they don't have granular control on the digital ads. Vidooly's brand safety technology aims to address this concern by advertisers.