Brand safety has to happen before the ad serves. Block content at the source.

Advertisers, agencies, and publishers have learned that complexity does not equal better performance. The ecosystem is still very complex; it's just more hops and more takers. We are moving to a healthier model, with fallout: MFA content (made-for-advertising) is being identified and eked out. Not where brands want to be. Shouldn't have been allowed in the ecosystem in the first place.

The loss of cookies and the move to real-time intent has brought contextual to the fore. Current brand-safety tech doesn't do enough of a good job. Today's contextual technology can tell a brand not only where people are but where they came from and where they went to. The targeting can be broader. The performance discipline is moving from CTR toward outcomes-based KPIs. For me, the holy grail.

News is still getting over-blocked. Not right for every brand to be there, but a whole audience is being de-targeted. Stagwell's research proves this out, and more brands are listening. Working with several newspapers, we found that on a normal news week (not while the Iranian war was on), over 60% of news stories had positive sentiment. Brands are missing out on being next to the attention-driven, highly engaged audience that news content delivers.

Positive sentiment drives better outcomes. Negative sentiment can also drive better outcomes for the right brand: a charity targeting aid relief in Iran or Gaza placed next to a loss-of-life article will speak to a person's pocket. We've seen those ads' performance skyrocket. It comes down to brand messaging.

Smarter brand safety means technology that assesses the risk of the content at source and stops it making it into the mainstream so the ad can't appear next to it. Lots of publishers do this through editorial codes of conduct. On platforms, it isn't happening. Meta and Google can build their own brand safety; they have many more engineers than we do. If they want technology that works, they can give us a shout.

AI's biggest difference is scale. Contextual precision across many articles and videos is impossible by human review. Without AI, it's me and you watching videos and picking which are suitable; we can't do that at scale, but AI can. AI can be transparent if designed well: explain how it's derived, show how it works. Deployed badly, it adds opacity.

An agency recently said they love that Mantis is the best contextual performer on plan (out of 11 vendors), and that by working with Mantis they're supporting the supply side and publishing. The agency had been told to spend less with ad-tech vendors. I would never have heard that before working in ad tech. Mantis is not an additional tag in between the buyer and the supply. It's coming from the supply side, scanning the article or video content, deciding whether it's suitable for advertising or not. A video product is launching that does the same at scale using audio-visual signals (not metadata, not keyword data).

When I speak to a board or C-level, I talk about efficiency, not sustainability. The more efficient we are, the less data we transfer, the less AI we use (or use sparingly), the less carbon. Fewer hops between buy and sell, fewer tags. Underneath: a commercial differentiator. We're saving the planet and saving money. That's the business case.

There's a gaping hole between demand and supply. Many of my roles have supported the supply side. What's needed: technology that helps both sides equally, rather than focusing on one. That's what Mantis is trying to do. Beneficial for both rather than concentrated on one.