Reach and IBM launch brand-safety AI to tackle unnecessary keyword blacklisting

Reach, the Daily Mirror and Daily Express publisher, has launched a brand-safety platform created by IBM that will hope to curb articles being unnecessarily blacklisted from advertising. The platform, called Mantis, uses IBM Watson's artificial-intelligence engine and machine learning to check whether content is appropriate. Reach began looking for a tech solution last year in response to a signficicant proportion of news content being blacklisted due to "less intuitive and less sophisticated solutions" currently on the market. The main four players offering third-party brand-safety solutions for publishers are ADmantX (which was hired by newspaper sales joint venture The Ozone Project earlier this year), DoubleVerify, Grapeshot and Integral Ad Science. Like ADmantX, Mantis uses natural language processing to decipher context in language.