Guest · Trust and brand safety
Fiona Salmon
Managing Director, Mantis
Twenty-six years across publishing, media sales, audience data and ad tech. Now running Mantis, the publisher-built contextual targeting and brand safety platform betting that complexity does not equal performance.
About
Fiona Salmon is Managing Director of Mantis, the contextual targeting and brand safety platform built by Reach. Twenty-six years across publishing, media sales, audience data and ad tech, on every side of the trading desk from print magazines to programmatic, now running a publisher-built business that argues complexity has not equalled better performance and that the only two people who really need to be in the room are brands and publishers.
Fiona’s career began in 1999 at Trinity Mirror Group as a Creative Solutions Executive selling sponsored editorial pullouts to PR and ad agencies. The Boursin cheese sponsorship of The Mirror’s Euro 2000 pullout became the blueprint for how Trinity Mirror sold the format. Six years at Emap followed as Advertising Manager on the Mens portfolio (FHM, Arena, Arena Homme+, Zoo), then a year at News International selling thesun.co.uk to the Group M agencies, before a nine-year run at Vibrant Media through Senior Director of Sales and Strategic Partnerships, Head of UK EMEA and APAC Business Development, Director of Publisher Solutions, and VP Global Business Development.
In 2017 she moved to 1plusX as Managing Director UK, leading the data management platform’s commercial business through the cookieless transition with machine-learning-derived audience predictions. A four-month role at the European Medical Journal as Director of Data and Digital Innovation was cut short by Covid. From September 2020 she spent almost four years at Captify, rising through VP Partnerships UK and EMEA, VP of Global Partnerships, and finally Global VP of Partnerships and Sustainability Lead, where she also oversaw the development and implementation of Captify’s sustainability goals and products.
In June 2024 Fiona became Managing Director of Mantis, the contextual and brand safety advertising platform launched in 2019 inside Reach plc. Mantis assesses content at source for sentiment, intent and suitability: it does not block keywords, it scans the article or video itself and decides whether it belongs alongside an ad. The suite spans Brand Safety, Contextual Targeting, Recommender and Natural Language AI. From November 2024 she is also Co-Chair of Reach plc’s Sustainability Committee.
Career27 years
- 2024 to now Reach plc Co-Chair, Sustainability Committee
- 2024 to now Mantis Managing Director
- 2023 to 2024 Captify Global VP of Partnerships and Sustainability Lead
- 2022 to 2023 Captify Vice President of Global Partnerships
Show earlier roles: Captify, European Medical Journal, 1plusX, Vibrant Media, News International, Emap, Trinity Mirror Group
- 2020 to 2022 Captify VP of Partnerships, UK & EMEA
- 2020 European Medical Journal Director, Data and Digital Innovation
- 2017 to 2020 1plusX Managing Director, UK
- 2015 to 2017 Vibrant Media VP Global Business Development
- 2011 to 2015 Vibrant Media Director, Publisher Solutions
- 2010 to 2011 Vibrant Media Head of UK, EMEA & APAC Business Development
- 2008 to 2010 Vibrant Media Senior Director of Sales and Strategic Partnerships
- 2007 to 2008 News International Online Group Head
- 2001 to 2007 Emap Advertising Manager
- 1999 to 2001 Trinity Mirror Group Creative Solutions Executive
How Fiona thinks3 convictions
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Brand safety begins at source. Not at the ad server.
Most brand-safety technology is downstream: it sits at the ad-serving layer and flags inventory that is already in the auction. Mantis sits upstream. It scans content at source, the article or the video, and decides whether it is suitable for advertising. Publishers already do this with editorial codes. Platforms could and should. Fiona points to the Molly Russell case as the ethical version of the argument: content should be blocked before a child sees it, and certainly before an ad funds it. Brand safety is an ethical floor as well as a commercial one.
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Past behaviours are out. Real-time intent is in.
Privacy, GDPR and cookieless browsers have ended the era of behavioural stalking across the web. Contextual targeting has been forced back to the centre, and the technology behind it is no longer a primitive keyword scan. Mantis can now tell a brand not just where people are, but where they came from and where they are going. That changes the question from "who is this person?" to "what cultural moment are they in?", which is a better question.
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A sustainable ecosystem is an efficient one.
Programmatic was built for scale, and with scale came non-transparent trading, made-for-advertising content, and a long tail of intermediaries each taking a cut. Fiona’s sustainability argument is also a commercial one: every hop in the chain is a data transfer with a carbon cost and a margin cost. Cut the hops. Use AI sparingly and well. Get closer to publishers. The healthier model and the more efficient model are the same model.
