DUBLIN, Ireland—Cybersecurity company AdSecure, part of whose focus is to provide digital publishers and platforms with new solutions to ensure the delivery of safe, high quality digital ads, has announced the launch of its newest offering: Content Classification. This new suite of classification solutions was created to help AdSecure clients understand and control the visual elements within their digital ad content, allowing them to eliminate explicit or potentially offensive images while keeping the content on point with their brand messaging.
Content Classification from AdSecure consists of three distinct modules, each providing classification for specific visual elements in the content that users will interact with: Unsafe Content, Ad Labels and Logo Detection.
The "Unsafe Content" module allows AdSecure partners to identify ad content that contains offensive images that users may find disturbing or misleading. AdSecure’s Unsafe Content Detection, powered by Google Cloud Vision, will classify potentially offensive content across five categories:
• Adult—Identifies content deemed as nudity or sexually explicit
• Racy—Identifies content deemed suggestive or containing mature visual elements
• Medical—Identifies content containing medically graphic images, also referred to as gore
• Violent—Identifies content considered violent and potentially disturbing for end users
• Spoof—Identifies content that can be considered as parody, misleading or “fake news”
"Ad Labels," the second module in AdSecure’s Content Classification suite, provides keyword classification for digital ad content, allowing for a deep understanding of how each visual element in an ad is categorized, including everything from landscape elements like trees or office buildings, to specific products that could be unwanted on a website, like alcohol or tobacco products.
The final module, "Logo Detection," will identify all ad imagery that contains brand and institution logos, and can help publishers and platforms ensure that the ads appearing on their pages include the intended branding, are not using recognizable brands to deliver misleading or malicious scams, and aren’t mimicking the branding of other companies, all issues commonly seen within the digital advertising ecosystem.
Bryan Taylor, AdSecure’s Manager for Sales and Customer Success, stated, “When we look at the challenge of tackling demand-side ad fraud and delivering safe, high quality user experiences, it’s important for publishers and platforms to go beyond identifying and blocking digital threats like malware, or malicious redirects. The visual imagery that site visitors will engage with should be safe for consumption as well. Eliminating offensive content that can disturb end users, or mislead them with scams that play on the iconography of established companies, is crucial to user engagement. We’re very excited to now help our partners identify content that could disturb users, or unintentionally tarnish the integrity of their own brand.”
In addition to these new Content Classification modules, AdSecure is also launching dedicated analytics hubs for each, which will provide users with instant, forensic level insights into all visual elements in their content.
“We’re heading toward a very important event with the upcoming U.S. election in November," Taylor noted. "We already see a multitude of misleading, deceptive or outright fake content surrounding the election that can leave users frustrated at best, or convinced by the deception at worst. Often users won’t understand the details of how this content came to be displayed, and will blame the website they found it on by default. For publishers and their demand partners, this means it’s very important to have constant visibility of what appears on the page. Content Classification aims to automate much of the work for ad ops teams and make it easy for them to maintain control of their content and their messaging.”
Content Classification is available on the AdSecure platform starting today. Those who would like to learn more about the work AdSecure does to help keep ads safe and optimized for high user engagement may reach out to AdSecure at [email protected].
