Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Ad Pepper Media has just rolled out in the U.S. its SiteScreen network, an accompaniment to its iSense network for matching advertising content to remnant inventory. iSense, built upon the Sense Engine semantic analysis technology, was released here earlier this year.

SiteScreen, which debuted earlier in Europe, is a brand-safe ad network that prevents online display ads from appearing next to objectionable content, according to online ad network and digital marketing technology provider Ad Pepper.

According to Sacha Carton, director of product and technology development and director of the board at Ad Pepper Media, the service has been serving as a response to demands by advertisers in the U.K. and Europe that their messages don't wind up in the wrong place at the wrong time online.

"You'd think that after years of trying to address the issue this would be solved, but unfortunately it has not," he says, until now.

Previous solutions have focused on wholesale-blocking-off of sections of the Internet as being safe or unsafe for advertisers, but SiteScreen offers a more nuanced approach, Ad Pepper says. Clients can determine what material is inappropriate to their message, relying on the provider's technology to rate specific web pages against 12 categories, ranging from adult to drugs to nudity to violence and weapons. The service leverages Ad Pepper's Sense Engine technology to read and process the meaning of Web page content to identify potentially controversial material before serving an ad. When a page is considered as having inappropriate material, an instruction is sent to the ad server to block the delivery of online advertisements to that page.

It's important to get granular, Carton says, rather than wall off entire swaths of the Internet -- or conversely, assume other sections are appropriate without reservation.
"Agencies have asked for detailed site lists of where their campaigns will run, almost assuming that if a site were, for example, CNN, their ads would be safe," he says. "That's partially true as it is a premium content environment, but as all news sites do it may generate content an advertiser deems objectionable."

For example, an advertiser may find it inappropriate to have an ad for a children's product appear on the same page as an article about crimes against kids. On the other hand, it may be very appropriate for a law enforcement agency or service to run an ad on that same page. "With SiteScreen's ability to understand the sensitivity of content and classify it, that gives you extra layers of protection," he says.

Clients also can have control over how sensitive they want filtering to be, based on brand safety objectives, slicing the dozen main content category filters more finely via a taxonomy set of over 3,000 categories.

"Each web page is semantically analyzed and attributed a severity rating that's interpreted for ad blocking purposes," he says. "Publishers don't really lose out because we pass the inventory back if it's filtering too negatively, so they regain control of that ad inventory and are free to pass onto the next advertiser."

With SiteScreen, the goal is to stop ads from appearing alongside controversial content "without reducing opportunities in this new dynamic content environment, without damaging brand image or reducing campaign performance," Carton notes. A suite of reporting tools lets advertisers review what content has been blocked, and advertisers pay only for delivered impressions while gaining their protection benefits.

In the U.K., SiteScreen is used by advertisers such as Barclaycard, Sony Ericsson, ING, Ask.com, Virgin, and Fiat, Ad Pepper says.