Scoota takes the issue of brand safety extremely seriously. We have worked continuously over the years to ensure that the creative formats we deliver provide end users with the best possible experience, while ensuring that the environment in which the creative appears is suitable to the intent and profile of the advertising brand. The present document outlines the steps we take with every campaign to ensure that this is the case.

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Pre-bid environment

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Ideally, buyers wouldn’t waste money buying undesirable inventory, and brands’ content wouldn’t appear in unsuitable environments. There are many proprietary technologies that can be plugged into programmatic buying platforms to help prevent this. The Scoota Rig platform is fully integrated with Grapeshot (http://www.grapeshot.com), whose market-leading content analysis system continuously scours the web, reading and categorising content according to keywords. Using this method, Grapeshot maintains a curated set of content category segments which, among many other, more salubrious ones, contains the following:

Adult

Arms

Crime

Death/injury

 

Download

Drugs

Hate speech

Military

Obscenity

Terrorism

Tobacco

We will automatically ignore any bids coming from content that matches any of these categories, so advertisers will not waste money or damage reputation by buying in these areas.

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Our platform fully supports desired/blocked domain listing to ensure that we only bid on inventory from approved sources, and we verify all incoming bid requests using the ads.txt initiative from the IAB. Our Sentinel and Agatha anomaly detection systems perform additional analysis to ensure that the domains bid on were indeed the domains where the tag was ultimately served.

We maintain a network of sites that we have partnered with to ensure safety in delivery and the proper functioning of our creative formats. A list of these sites is available on request. The majority of campaigns that we run through our platform is targeted to a whitelisted subset of those sites, which automatically excludes any other non-approved sites.

On the occasions when we deliver campaigns into the open market, our system detects suspicious activity and automatically blocks further bids on those sources across all campaigns. From this information, per-campaign blacklists of sites can be built for distribution to clients. These can be augmented manually by blacklists provided by clients from their own records.

In cases where our creative tags our placed into third party delivery systems, we have no control over where and how those tags are delivered. We do, however, actively encourage those clients who deliver ads in this way to observe best practice in protecting their brand clients’ reputation.

Our creative tags are fully compatible with ad blocking and viewability services provided by Integral Ad Science (https://integralads.com), Moat (https://moat.com) and Double Verify (http://www.doubleverify.com). These systems provide pre- and post-bid protection, preventing ads from being displayed to the user even when the ad tag has been delivered to the page.

We have frequently and successfully delivered campaigns with tags integrated with those systems. We work actively with any third party provider of such services and have deliberately structured our tags and code to make it as simple as possible to create new integrations as required.

 
Post-bid environment

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In addition to the above preventive measures, every Scoota creative delivered performs extensive analysis of the delivery environment it finds itself in. All of our formats have been created and coded by us, and only we know exactly how they work, whether they’re displaying and performing as they should, and whether the environment they’re in is a suitable one.

Our Sentinel system automatically runs a number of tests and analysis of the host page, and together with our Agatha anomaly and brand safety detection system, provides us with a comprehensive picture of every single delivery, feeding back a huge amount of diagnostic information for further analysis in our data pipeline. This gives us a uniquely detailed profile of the health of the supply landscape, regardless of whether the ad tags have been served by us or a third party. The information gathered in this way can be used to optimise our own bidder away from domains, networks or delivery channels that might ultimately be providing suspicious inventory. Full details of these systems are available on request.

Information gathered by Sentinel and Agatha can be made available for use in third party delivery systems such as AppNexus, DBM or The Trade Desk (among many others).

 
Inappropriate delivery

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Our creative formats, analysis pipeline and bidder technology is constantly evolving to deal with the numerous challenges that the digital advertising faces. Our end-to-end approach links the formats themselves with the pre-bid environment to provide an integrated system that is self-learning and highly transparent and informative. We feel that this approach is unique in the market.

However, no system is perfect – if you think you’ve seen a Scoota creative served into an undesirable environment, or someone has alerted you to that fact, please contact us at info@scoota.com. It would be extremely helpful if you could provide us with us much detail as possible, including the domain or full web address of the site in question, the date and time that it happened, and the local time zone of the user. Our campaign operations team will investigate within an hour of the message being received during standard UK office hours and, if the ad tag has been served via our own platform, within 24 hours we will pause the affected activity while we undergo a full analysis of the delivery of that creative, adding the domain or page in question to our blacklist and taking any further remedial action necessary to ensure the problem is not repeated.

If the creative tag in question has been delivered via a third party system run by one of our clients, we will immediately contact them with your details and theirs, and employ the reporting from our Sentinel and Agatha systems to assist them in locating and neutralising the problem.