Xaxis & Vidooly deploy AI tool to protect Indian advertisers’ brands on YouTube

Video marketing analytics platform Vidooly is partnering Xaxis, GroupM’s outcomes-focused programmatic media company, to launch a new Artificial Intelligence (AI) brand safety tool for Xaxis customers. The tool analyses all YouTube content to ensure contextual safety for specific brand values, enabling the prevention of ad placement in (or adjacent to) pornography, violence, illegal acts, communal videos and other suggestive content which could adversely affect a brand’s reputation. This is a first-of-its-kind solution in India, which allows advertisers and brands to benefit regardless of the scale of their marketing budgets. 

Vidooly’s Vuvid Brand Safety Suite consists of collection of AI models for processing NSFW (Not Suitable for Work) content. This has been developed by studying millions of videos across social platforms with NSFW content. Vidooly’s Vuvid Brand Safety Suite consists of models exclusively for Adult & Nudity, Violence, Hate, Alcohol & Drugs and other contextually unfit content. The suite also has custom threshold and required AI model selection ability to suit varying interest of the users. It can be customised to scan an entire campaign to single content to receive the Brand Safety Score for better decisions. 

Vidooly first rolled out a beta version of its Brand Safety tool in 2017. While currently available only to Xaxis clients in India for use with YouTube, Vidooly plans to expand its offering to other video platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, OTT services and online video publishing platforms. 

Nishant Radia, CMO and co-founder, Vidooly, commented, “Brand Safety is a key challenge for marketers advertising online. Recently in the US, around 300 brands were found advertising on YouTube channels promoting Nazis, propaganda and videos about white nationalists. Due to unsafe videos/ channels, at times advertisers have paused their video campaigns to secure the safety of their brands, but now advertisers have a powerful new tool to create a safety programme appropriate to their brands. We aim to expand the scope and availability of this tool pan India and also globally in the next 12 months.” 

Tushar Kalra, Head of Programmatic Trading, Xaxis, added here, “Long gone are the days when advertisers could simply rely on reaching audiences in carefully curated programming environments. Most brands today have scaled their advertising on digital platforms like YouTube, where most content is user-generated, but their needs for mature and safe ad products and environments persist. Although it is not possible to eliminate all risks in user-generated media, our clients’ hard-won brand reputations must be protected with the best efforts possible. We appreciate our partnership with Vidooly to provide our clients with better brand safety controls, and we believe it’s essential that all digital platforms carrying ad-supported user-generated content do the same. 

Together, Vidooly and Xaxis can better ensure that clients’ ads run in content that flexibly matches brand safety parameters established by clients, and have ran over 120 campaigns. Every client is unique and each has different brand values and tolerance for risk, which GroupM agencies can accommodate through their use of Vidooly data and tools. Over time, more transparency about where ads are running on YouTube will strengthen the ecosystem and help advertisers better understand the role that YouTube content plays in campaign performance.