Companies will soon be able to advertise their products without fear the content being blocked for the wrong reasons. Reach Plc, which owns a number of national and regional titles including Express.co.uk, recently announced its new AI-powered tool aimed at helping advertisers get their message to readers alongside content which is deemed safe for their brands.
This new system, known as ‘Mantis’, means advertising can be directed to appear only alongside news stories that have been categorised as neutral and positive. And now, for the latest improvement, the team behind Mantis worked with Brand Advance, the leading cultural marketing agency specialising in LGBTQ+, Black, Asian and minority ethnic audiences, to bring intelligent brand safety tools to the system as well.
This should boost Mantis’ precision and mean that advertisements and information campaigns are always displayed beside relevant, safe and positive news stories that complement the ads.
While brands owners have a rightful concern about where their product or service sits in the digital space, such as adult material or negative Covid-19 news stories about death, less sophisticated brand safety filters use blunt ad-blocking prejudice by labelling most content as unsafe because it cannot make sense of it. Brand Advance will also use Mantis to inform and reach BAME communities for important campaigns such as Covid-19 track and trace.
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Historically, information campaigns have struggled to reach minority groups in mainstream media. Given the ongoing public health crisis and the importance of the Covid-19 track and trace campaign, this could have huge ramifications.
Elsewhere, news content with the word ‘Lesbian’ is also often rejected as unsuitable for brand advertisers because it appears on a brand ‘blocklist’. Mantis, which is powered by IBM Watson’s Natural Language Understanding, is different as it can determine context around the word.
For instance, it can identify positive news stories about LGBTQ role models. This allows brands to appear next to stories about diversity and inclusivity – something that less intelligent blocklists cannot do.
Emily Britton, Head of Publisher Development at Mantis said, “The LGBTQ+ and BAME publishing communities have been overly affected by prejudicially blunt blocklists which cannot determine context and sentiment around the use of words such as ‘Lesbian’ ‘Queer’ ‘Muslim’ and ‘Black’. Mantis working with Brand Advance remedies this conundrum for publishers and brands by ensuring that these publishing communities and brands are better compensated and supported by the AdTech industry.”
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