Andy Lerner is the CEO of Trust Metrics. Here Lerner discusses the Trust Metrics proposition, how it is working with buy and sell side partners in the automated channel, and how its solution is being adapted for the European market.

Can you give us an overview of the Trust Metrics offering? What problems are you addressing in the exchange ecosystem?

First, let me offer a little background. Premium brands, including many fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) brands, aren't committing budgets to ad networks and exchanges at any significant level. And, if they are, the marketers who are managing those FMCG brands would be horrified to see the kinds of environments that their ads are supporting.

As noted in a December 2010 Forrester Report, a primary barrier to real-time bidding (RTB) spending is “concern over the quality of the inventory”. The current levels of transparency are simply not sufficient, and, until now, no technology has allowed advertisers to view inventory before the buy, when media planning and the decision to buy is taking place.

That’s where Trust Metrics comes in. Buyers and sellers of online advertising use our solution to automate the evaluation of overall content quality at the domain, sub-domain and page levels. We provide a level of transparency that every brand requires and that was simply unavailable until our release. The problems that we’re addressing in the exchange ecosystem are two-fold:

1. We’re helping brands gain the confidence needed to invest into exchange-traded media.
2. We’re helping exchanges and RTB-enabled service organisations to ensure brands’ messages are consumed within quality content and environments.

Are you trying to change the way the industry looks at scale?

Yes, absolutely. Right now, the way that the industry looks at scale is black and white. It’s either good or bad. Bad is defined as “unsafe”, but that’s a very limited way to actually judge the universe of inventory. In reality, there is black and white and every other colour in the spectrum. We enable both buyers and sellers of inventory to identify the entire spectrum of value at scale.

How does Trust Metrics work with media buyers?

We put the planning back in media planning and buying. We provide extraordinarily deep and flexibly tailored insights into online advertising inventory, whether it’s for 10 or 10,000 sites, and we provide these insights before any buy is made. In addition to overall quality, our standard output has classifications for the majority of the IAB’s Network and Exchanges Quality Assurance Guidelines (http://www.iab.net/ne_guidelines). Safety-related issues, type and level of UGC, copyright infringement, etc. are covered too.

Also, every brand will define a quality environment differently. What works for Unilever’s Axe is different than what works for Unilever’s Dove. Similarly, a pharmaceutical company has a very different set of goals in terms of an online content environment for its marketing messages than, let’s say, a luxury car company. So we mimic a buyer’s judgment and identify the right environment for the particular brand he or she is representing. The Trust Metrics solution is more accurate than humans when assessing a site’s environment. Our product saves media planners hundreds if not thousands of hours currently devoted to web site evaluation.

What is the process? How do clients get started using the TM ratings?

The fundamental process is the same for buyers and sellers of online media: there are three steps.

1. Client supplies Trust Metrics with a list of sites.
2. Trust Metrics rates overall publishing quality and supplies ratings either in real-time, during the decision process or within 24 hours via flat file to support planning efforts.
3. Client buys or sells against the Trust Metrics white list.

By way of example, for ad network buys, agencies supply us with lists of the sites that their ad network supplier partners provide for a specific media buy. We can apply our base model against these site lists and provide quality ratings that same day. This way, a buyer can perform side-by-side network comparisons of the quality of the inventory being offered.

We also provide web-based access to our ratings, as well as API-driven access to power RTB solutions.

Most of the major DSPs (e.g., Invite Media, AppNexus, MediaMath, Turn, etc.) welcome Trust Metrics data and recognise that it is essential for premium brands to increase their online display ad budgets. In short, buyers and sellers of online media can use our service and our data to support each campaign they are planning.

Can you provide some specifics of how Trust Metrics works with the sell side?

First, we can automate the sell side’s classification of inventory, whether it's existing inventory or it’s inventory requesting access to the sell side’s network. We can also highly customise the classification to a seller’s needs. For example, ratings can be delivered for overall quality, IAB and IASH quality assurance guidelines, copyright infringement, site intent, presence and amount of UGC, etc. Second, we give the sell side a chance to expand its inventory via RTB while maintaining its quality standards.

Third, we enable premium publishers to sell inventory via RTB while remaining obfuscated in order to prevent channel conflict. For example, a premium news site with a blind ID will often not be bought as advertisers want to know the source of their buy. Today, with a Trust Metrics quality rating, this same publisher can flow through an exchange fully obfuscated. Because of advertisers’ growing familiarity and trust in our product, buyers will be much more inclined to bid on this Trust Metrics vetted and rated inventory.

Fourth, we enable large networks to monitor their partner sites’ publishing practices. If a site begins to violate the network’s quality standards, an automated alert will be sent to the network. The network can provide the site’s managers with a Trust Metrics detailed report, informing them of how it can improve.

Is Trust Metrics the next generation of campaign or content verification (CV)?

Yes, most definitely. And what sets us apart is the simple fact that our services play a foundational role upfront, during the early media planning stages versus current safety/verification providers, which go to work only after all of the planning is done, budgets have been locked down and campaigns are rolling.

This is why we don’t see ourselves competing with current CV services. We see ourselves as the engine of the planning process, evaluating for safety, context and literally hundreds of additional criteria that matter to all brand advertisers—before a buy is ever made.

Current CV services can and still do play an important role “in-campaign”. For example, a solution like AdXpose, which provides a whole range of fascinating, creative engagement data and metrics, can add potentially invaluable colour to Trust Metrics data and campaign performance measurement.

We like to think of what we are doing as a quantum leap from services that are currently providing page level transparency. We’ve moved upstream to provide a more relevant and robust snapshot to brand advertisers, and, quite frankly, until this work was done, premium brands were steering clear of RTB and, to some extent, ad networks.

Trust Metrics now enables premium brands to finally have a way to know exactly what they are buying and to avoid the stuff they don’t want or need.

What are the metrics behind Trust Metrics?

Our proprietary technology enables us to collect data from dozens of sources and many millions of web pages, extracting nominal and numeric feature values and then applying an algorithm to those values. This data collection work is dynamic and constantly refreshed, providing us with an up-to-the-minute view of how a page looks—and more importantly—how valuable that page (and site) is to an advertiser. Then, machine-learning techniques, such as high dimensional regression, are applied to remove the guesswork associated with defining exactly how a site rates.

Can you provide us with an overview of the quality of inventory in the automated channel?

Although there’s a lot of junk out there and everyone knows it, the good news is that there’s a great deal of good quality inventory out there as well. Again, it’s a matter of being able to find it. Sure, some brands will use scale inventory (i.e., ad networks and exchange-traded media) to subsidise direct premium buys to massively increase reach while dramatically lowering their overall CPM. With these dramatic benefits comes some compromise in overall quality, but this doesn’t mean brands need to risk being exposed—and in some cases overexposed—in poor online media environments.

Is Trust Metrics a contextual play for brands?

Yes and no. Yes, as in that Trust Metrics enables buyers and sellers of online media to rate content (and many other variables) in advance of the space around it being sold to brand advertisers.

What Trust Metrics is not in the business of doing is enabling buyers and sellers to target advertising on a “semantic” basis.

We’re also not in the contextual ad-targeting space — not in the way that it has become widely known over the past decade. Again, to be clear, the Trust Metrics service is always used in advance of buying or selling inventory.

You recently partnered with Infectious Media. Can you give us some insight into how it’s working out and what value Trust Metrics brings to this new relationship?

It’s a new relationship and one we are very excited about. Infectious Media is seeing the same problems we are seeing, where brands are not actively investing in RTB. The team at Infectious — and hats off to them — saw an opportunity to put into play an innovative technology with the aim of growing its appeal and value to premium advertisers.

In terms of specifics, we recently developed custom ratings for Infectious, which are designed to serve European advertisers. They are going out in the market, using these customised ratings to generate more business. We’re also working closely with Invizua, a consultancy in London that is representing Trust Metrics in Europe.