Last week, Scope3 made a series of product announcements, touching on two of the hot-button issues in ad tech right now: brand safety and ad curation. This is a further sign that competition in ad tech is heating up.
First of all, it’s worth recapping the particulars of the launch — Digiday earlier perused the details in an interview with Scope3 CEO Brian O’Kelley — which included an “agentic advertising platform” among a raft of tie-ups. Among the high-profile names involved are Amazon, Google, Meta and The Trade Desk.
At the core of all the announcements was “AI-driven media optimization,” including a hub for agentic media products, a curation offering whereby users can use a centralized application to set controls across supply-side platforms, and a Brand Standards tool.
Scope3, a company that initially started as a sustainability-focused firm measuring carbon emissions across the digital media supply chains, has seemingly pivoted. For some, the sustainability elements of Scope3’s use of AI are a byproduct of its efforts to reinvigorate the space.
Speaking at Scope3’s Landscape conference last week, O’Kelley shared his opinion on how the ad tech ecosystem needed an overhaul. “If we were to plug all of these AI technologies into the incredibly inefficient programmatic supply chain, we would hear not just environmental problems, but many other things,” he said, referencing concerns such as brand safety and the need for consolidation in the supply chain.
Disruption in brand safety
Speaking with Digiday, Ciarán O’Kane, a principal at investment firm First Party Capital, noted how Scope3’s pivot was a shot across the bow of ad verification vendors — after all, it did purchase a France-based startup in the space, Adloox, late last year.
He further observed how Scope3 is emulating leaders in the ad verification space in becoming a “super signal aggregator,” citing DoubleVerify’s 2023 acquisition of Scibids and Integral Ad Science’s 2021 purchase of Amino Payments. For many observers, this is an example of how companies in the space have to chase new revenue streams, principally by getting into media activation, a shift from their beginnings as measurement firms.
During the Landscape conference, hosted on March 13 in New York City, several panelists observed how content verification needs an overhaul — Scope3 claimed it uses AI agents to let media teams specify brand safety, a more sophisticated approach than using keyword blocklists.
Speaking on stage, Arielle Garcia, COO of the Check My Ads Institute, observed that the outdated orthodoxy of brand safety urgently needs an overhaul, especially with the emergence of generative AI. “If you look at things, the proliferation of AI means MFAs [made for advertising websites] are only going to keep expanding,” she said, further observing how legacy tech is “consistently inconsistent.”
Several sources told Digiday that Scope3 has already started to pitch its brand safety wares to Madison Avenue’s major holding company agencies. Almost all sources observed the need for improvements in the space — an issue underlined several times in high-profile research reports from Adalytics.
Speaking with Digiday before Scope3’s announcement, Ben Hovaness, chief media officer at OMD Worldwide, explained some of the economic pressures incurred by the buy-side of the industry when keyword blocklists are applied en masse.
“It can excessively winnow inventory. … Because most of it is priced through an auction, then you get a supply-demand mechanic. If you cut your inventory pool by 50%, it’s going to boost prices; if you cut it by 80%, it’s going to boost them even more,” he said, adding that the application of AI to the brand safety process should bring a welcome amelioration of effective CPMs.
Sell-side curation = more competition
Scope3 also used its Landscape event to preview other technologies, including a prototype filtering technology that uses AI to make buying decisions in a curation platform (typically on the sell-side), another development that some interpreted as further competition for demand-side platforms.
Andrew Casale, CEO of Index Exchange — one of the launch partners of Scope3’s platform — observed how these developments help “make the sell-side smarter.” He further observed that a potential benefit for “the open internet,” i.e. legacy publishers, includes the potential to attract advertisers’ outcome budgets away from walled garden platforms, such as Google’s Performance Max. For Casale, such developments amount to a “structural change,” not just a change in business model. “This is the next chapter of innovation in the market,” he added.
“There’s a shift in the economics of ad tech … you used to have the concentration of money on the buy-side, and now the supply side has built an activation layer,” observed First Party Capital’s O’Kane, adding that such developments will likely accelerate consolidation in the space.
