The news: Ad tech platform Scope3 launched Brand Standards, an AI-backed brand safety platform that offers advertisers greater control over where their content appears online.

• The platform lets businesses crawl websites to detect if there is illegal or offensive content that marketers may not want their ads to appear alongside.
• It can also rule out “false blocking” of keywords, ensuring that advertisers don’t lose marketing opportunities by removing their ads from places that wouldn’t actually harm a campaign’s value.

Scope3 CEO and co-founder Brian O’Kelley said Brand Standards is already integrated within The Trade Desk and Google, and Dotdash Meredith will sell the tool, per Marketing Brew.

Keyword risks: Outdated or overly general keyword blocking can cause brands to miss valuable advertising opportunities. For example, advertisers inadvertently blocked 56% of Oscars-related content due to outmoded blocklists, despite most of the content being brand safe, per Mantis.

“It’s about precision. I want to make sure I block only the things that I really don’t want my brand next to, because everything I block is costing me eyeballs (and) money,” O’Kelley said.

To create more intelligent keyword blockers, Scope3 is using AI models from Google, Vertex, Claude, and Llama.

Better analysis with AI: Advertisers can also prompt Scope3’s models to look for the context behind web content.

• This could help advertisers screen publisher content with more nuance, like ensuring that an ad for life insurance doesn’t appear alongside an article about a deadly incident.
• “Every brand is going to have a different understanding of that page, because every brand actually has different needs from a suitability perspective,” O’Kelley said.

Scope3 can tailor models to specific advertisers and create “brand suitability” scores that help advertisers understand which sites are safest for their content. This could also help publishers attract more advertisers by seeing how many brands were advised not to use their sites.

Our take: Scope3’s tools could help brands that are leery about advertising in an increasingly contentious media landscape, giving them an option to avoid appearing near specific news topics rather than removing ads from those sites entirely.