• by Alex Weprin , January 25, 2018

The mobile video advertising company Receptiv is introducing a three-part media guarantee, ensuring that its video inventory is reliable, brand safe -- and, in what it says is an industry first, provides engaged viewership.

“To responsibly serve brands, publishers and users, all players in the advertising ecosystem need to focus on data and technology that precede the value of a format’s ability to gain a user’s attention in a non-intrusive way,” Ari Brandt, Receptiv’s CEO, told Digital News Daily. “This means less jazz hands and more data-driven decisions.”

According to Magna Global, marketers will spend $147 billion on mobile in 2018. However, fraud, brand safety and viewability remain major concerns on mobile platforms. Similarly, brands and marketers have more choices than ever when it comes to choosing where to spend their advertising budgets.

Brandt says that to his company, “reliable” means that content is viewable, reaches the right people and is free of bots or other non-human actors in the system. Receptiv works with analytics and ad measurement company Moat to track reliability, as well as Nielsen DAR and IAS.

In terms of brand safety, the company works with publishers and applications that abide by Apple and Google’s mobile app store policies, but the company also polices itself. Receptiv “does a two week onboarding process that includes a rigorous process to vet content, verify audience and discover product placement before SDK integration,” Brandt says.

As for engagement, Receptiv looks for mobile environments “that are proven to positively impact a mobile video campaign’s performance.” The company is working with comScore to guarantee engagement for marketers.

“We hope that this guarantee really gets brands excited about how high their expectations should be, cleaning up the supply and cleaning up the formats," Brandt says.
"Coalition for Better Ads are making some big changes in February by having Chrome block some really popular formats. And ads.txt promises to clean up some arbitraging and inaccurate representations of resellers,”

He adds: “The industry needs to prioritize users, brands and publishers now more than ever. Mobile can be a powerful force, but the pendulum will surely swing both ways."