Meet Elea.ai, the CTV Ad Recognition Intelligence
Why Elea.ai?
Mid-2021, advertisers are lining up to buy CTV & streaming eyeballs. Nearly three quarters (73%) of CTV buyers report shifting budget from broadcast and cable to CTV in 2021. More than a third (35%) of buyers expect to increase CTV video ad spending this year also according to IAB’s Video Ad Spend 2020 and Outlook for 2021 report, released at the IAB 2021 NewFronts.
Despite this rise in advertiser demand for streaming audiences, frequency management has thus far remained a challenge for many CTV publishers with multiple creatives from the same advertiser or competitive ads running back to back within the same ad breaks.
In this context, the need for highly effective ad podding technology becomes crucial on the sell-side. Competitive ad separation, ad deduplication & frequency capping are among the top requirements listed by publishers to secure new & increased advertising budgets. Repetitive ads are also listed as a common issue causing users to drop-off from programs or cancel streaming services.
This is why Publica built Elea AI, an artificial intelligence engine that leverages CTV-specific ad delivery algorithms in the process of constructing ad-breaks.
How does Elea.ai work?
The first application for Elea AI is utilizing a logo recognition Machine Learning (ML) algorithm to identify the brand behind a video ad. In real-time, the algorithm is able to double-check or supply the IAB category and advertiser domain from the ad.
Over the past few months, we’ve been analyzing factors enabling accurate ad-deduplication at scale. Critical data signals such as the advertiser domain are only present in about 34% of CTV bid responses today. The IAB category of the ad is passed in 51% of cases. Some technologies rely on clickthrough URLs which can be widely inaccurate in an environment where a click isn’t an option for the end user. Elea AI is a material step into further ensuring that our deduplication and frequency capping algorithms perform at the highest level, even in the absence of signals from the buy side.
“In addition to securing great experience for viewers and improved yields for publishers, we believe this helps to build increased trust between advertisers and the publishers using our Ad Server”, says Ben Antier, Co-Founder & CEO at Publica.
Next Steps & results
Elea AI is now out of Beta and available to all publishers on their technology platform. The R&D program led by the engineering team at Publica to enhance Elea is now focusing its efforts on bringing artificial intelligence into the Unified Auction, in order to keep maximizing the yield generated between programmatic & direct demand sources.
“The team at Publica is constantly innovating to help us reach the highest level of performance, for both monetization and user experience. We’re excited about this new layer of automation to ensure that our users are not inundated with the same ads over and over while enabling more programmatic buyers access to our premium video inventory.” says Reed Barker, Head of Advertising at Philo.
