Filtering Political Ads: Leveraging AI and human creative to find incremental opportunities while maintaining brand safety.
The Cynopsis’ Political Ad Spending Conference 2024 brought together key players in the CTV and advertising space to discuss AI initiatives, political ad spending and optimizing CTV amid the 2024 election cycle.
Political ad spend is expected to smash records by the end of the current election cycle, topping more than $10 billion. With these kinds of statistics, it’s critical that the players in this space understand where the dollars are flowing and how to position themselves to take advantage of this wave before - and while - it’s happening. For example, money is moving from linear TV to streaming, Spanish-language ads are expected to increase, and there’s growth in down-ballot spending.
We know many publishers are expecting non-brand safe political ads and are forced to block the entire category. At the same time, many political advertisers find themselves supply-constrained and are having issues accomplishing the scale they need.
In the session “Filtering Political Ads: Leveraging AI and human creative review to find incremental opportunities while protecting publisher brand and safety” moderated by Noor Naseer of Basis Technologies, Albert Y, Chief Revenue Officer at ElementalTV and Gabe Thomas, VP Product Strategy & Business Development at Safe Exchange, shed light on key publisher pain points in the context of political ads. An audit shared during the presentation for programmatic political ads for 60 days showed only 7.5% of the ads were correctly represented as political! It’s gross misrepresentation like this that results in upsetting or alienating an audience, loss of revenue and more.
Shifting the focus from the overarching category to the actual content of the ad will help publishers more granularly decide what ad content is acceptable for their audience. Instead of having to eliminate an entire political category, you can confidently weed out the political ads that don’t align with your audience through a hybrid approach of humans and AI, because neither are perfect.
Albert Yu further explained that with the use of AI tools to scan through ad creative and figure out the actual categorization through integrations, they can replace it, fill the gaps and correct it when it goes to publishers, activating the revenue they may be missing. “It’s very important to have tools like this to clean up the ad quality that comes through,” said Yu.
While Yu acknowledged there are always going to be rogues, “having an AI layer really reduces it. It’s never going to be 100%, but it’s going to get you very close to having an ‘ad safe’ environment,” he concluded.
