Xandr said it will make GumGum’s Verity contextual targeting and brand safety technology available to its clients.
“GumGum will be the first new contextual provider added to any major DSP in years, which signals the true shift to contextual that is happening in the industry today,” said William Merchan, GumGum’s head of Verity. “Expanding our partnership with Xandr to offer our accredited contextual technology directly in their platform is exciting and allows us to give advertisers what they want — a cookie-less solution that is proven, transparent and effective at scale.”
Last year, GumGum became the first independent third-party to achieve Media Rating Council accreditation for content level brand safety.
Also: Ad Tech Firm GumGum Gets $75 Million From Goldman Sachs
GumGum and Xandr have been working together since 2012 when GumGum's supply-side platform was connected to Xandr’s Invest DSP. Xandr is in the process of being sold by AT&T to Microsoft.
The new integration makes GumGum available through Xandr’s Invest DSP and Xandr Curate for prebid targeting. Through Xandr Curate, advertisers will be able to activate Verity on Monetize SSP supply on almost any DSP. Advertisers using Xandr’s Invest DSP will be able to apply GumGum’s contextual intelligence solution for brand safety, contextual segments, keywords, and sentiment to purposefully align their ads with relevant content to drive attention and brand recall.
Also: GumGum Streaming Overlay Ads Don’t Give Viewers a Break
“Many advertisers are integrating contextual targeting into their campaigns as they look to the future of digital advertising,” said Dylan McBride, global head of partnership at Xandr. “Our integration of Verity further enhances Xandr’s holistic identity offering by giving our buyers the ability to target their key audience, with a sophisticated pre-bid solution that allows for multi-purpose use cases including brand safety, IAB categorization, threat classification and sentiments expressed.”
Working with Xandr will increase Verity’s scale.
“We’ve worked with a few smaller DSPs in the past and wanted to give our clients the ability to use Verity technology across the open web, not just across GumGum products,“ Merchamnn said. “Now, our 150 agency partners and 700 brand partners will be able to use Verity in the Xandr DSP to work across other supply they are accessing.”
GumGum will process more than 100 million pages per day and over 9 billion requests per day from Xandr alone.
Merchan sees the sale of Xandr to Microsoft as a positive. “Microsoft has been one of the largest brand advertisers across GumGum over the last five years, it should only continue to strengthen the relationship between GumGum and Xandr,” he said.
Verity uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to detect contextual signals.
Merchan said Verity, is the only contextual intelligence solution of its kind to combine natural language processing with computer vision to read all of the data signals in digital environments - text, image, audio, and video content - and make decisions around web content with human-like nuance.
“These deep learning tools target context rather than outdated behavioral signals that rely on personal data,” he said. ■
