• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, May 31, 2011

Hoping to make the Web safer for brand marketers, DoubleVerify on Tuesday is expected to relaunch its BrandShield ad-blocking service.

While the online ad market is improving, fear of inappropriate ad placement remains a drag on spending, insists Oren Netzer, CEO of DoubleVerify.

"To boost transparency and accountability in the industry, we've built our solution to specifically address this problem," he said.

BrandShield attempts to identify unwanted Web pages to prevent awkward placements before they occur. The new service can be customized, based on blacklist sites, whitelist sites, inappropriate page content categories and targeted geographies.

These features can also be used by ad networks, demand-side platforms and ad exchanges through the BrandShield Connect API.

According to recent research by DoubleVerify, the most compliant ad platforms showed incidents of noncompliance just 3% of the time -- outperforming the lower tier of players by almost nine times.

DoubleVerify says it can deliver a 96% see-through rate, or the rate at which ad impressions can be accurately located and verified. To do this, even before an ad is served to a page, DoubleVerify analyzes the site content with a proprietary crawling technology and compares it with agency campaign guidelines.

The company claims it can identify more than 75 possible inappropriate content categories, including natural disasters, aviation accidents and financial crisis.