• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, July 8, 2025

Fraud-free ad inventory supported by safety and metrics that can analyze content to help advertisers and publishers meet global media-quality requirements seem to be an ideal match--even for smaller companies.

This is what Germany-based ShowHeroes and DoubleVerify hope to offer to advertisers and publishers through a programmatic partnership announced Tuesday. 

DoubleVerify works with large, global brands, platforms, and publishers, but the company has expanded services to better serve small to mid-sized businesses, particularly in performance advertising.  

ShowHeroes supports connected TV (CTV) advertising and offers creative ad services, and provides access to inventory and measurement tools to help advertisers reach their return on ad spend (ROI). 

The companies said the goal is to combine complementary strengths that address fragmentation, metrics, measurement and data, particularly for contextual video and CTV. 

The collaboration integrates ShowHeroes’ SemanticHero technology with DoubleVerify’s Marketplace Suite with a goal to improve brand safety, invalid traffic protection, and contextual relevance.

ShowHeroes technology relies on advanced machine learning and natural language processing to analyze on-page content in real time. The company touts being a privacy-compliant-based contextual targeting option, eliminating the need for advertisers to rely on third-party cookies or user tracking.

The core challenge the partnership addresses is the need to ensure higher quality and effective advertising. It's impossible to manually review and filter ad placements on platforms like YouTube, where hours of video are uploaded each minute, but automation can help.

The integration includes pre-bid segmentation, fraud prevention, viewability filters, and more than 100 content avoidance categories.

The combined solution creates a framework that delivers performance and protection in what the companies refer to as a “future-ready solution” that improves media quality.

Some questions remain unanswered. How do these types of relationship support the emergence of AI agents, as the technology becomes more popular and begins to roll out? Will advertisers still need to gain deep insights and actionable metrics across desktop, mobile, and CTV platforms -- or will they rely on AI to dump the data into a dashboard so it can make those decisions?