News UK the publisher of The Sun, The Times, The Sunday Times and talkSPORT has announced a pioneering partnership with Illuma, to introduce a new tool to counter tagging miscategorization and drive accuracy and efficiency for advertisers
News UK says that they will become the first publisher to put this ‘innovative and industry-certified ‘methodology into practice using the Nucleus Narr(ai)te tool.
Charlie Celino, Head of Strategic Development, News UK, said: “This latest extension to the Nucleus suite of products uses cutting-edge AI to answer a core problem for publishers – how to accurately and efficiently tag content for advertisers at scale. Working with Illuma we can now offer agencies and brands more precisely categorised tagging, enabling more effective contextual targeting and greater brand safety.
“What’s important for us as a publisher is that the more nuanced understanding that Narr(ai)te offers means that we can open up large areas of content that might traditionally been wrongly labelled as brand unsafe. This enables advertisers to access more highly-engaged audiences via our trusted, quality journalism. Narr(ai)te is a significant development for the industry and wouldn’t have been possible without the hard work, determination and cross-collaboration between teams at both News UK and Illuma.”
Peter Mason, CEO and Co-Founder, Illuma: “Our collaboration with News UK demonstrates that superior publisher-led standards of contextual accuracy significantly enhance audience relevance for ad campaigns, improving the user experience. This highly nuanced categorisation also opens up more premium, brand-safe inventory, creating scale and opportunity for advertisers and facilitating the flow of revenues into quality journalism.”
News UK was involved in training Illuma’s AI model, allowing it to understand the nuances in the brand’s tone of voice and content types creating publisher-specific classifications and this has presented an opportunity for News UK to influence the way tagging is placed on content by NLPs (Natural Language Processors) at scale, allowing News UK’s newsbrands a dual methodology whereby tagging is qualified by AI and validated by humans.
Richard Reeves, Managing Director of AOP, said: “This partnership between News UK and Illuma is a brilliant example of collaborative action being the most powerful tool for tackling industry challenges. Brand safety is an ongoing issue, one with complex nuances, but this market solution demonstrates an enhanced approach to contextual tagging practices; a way to truly understand content – benefiting all parties and driving a healthy digital media ecosystem. At AOP, we’re always looking for new and better ways to move the industry forward and are pleased to champion initiatives like this.”
News UK have released early validation testing which they say shows a subsequent +10% average increase in segment accuracy with notable improvements observed in verticals such as
- ‘Beauty & Skincare’ +25% (The Sun)
- ‘Tech’ +11% (The Sun)
- ‘Travel’ +12% (The Sun)
- ‘Sport’ +20% (The Times)
- ‘Autos’ +16% (The Times)
- ‘Retail’ +13% (The Times)
News UK sya that they understand that some content can be considered as non-brand safe but the protection of advertisers within this type of content remains a priority. They say that Narr(ai)te will allow for fair categorisation via the retraining of tagging methods utilised, allowing for a nuanced understanding of the content.
The tool has increased the number of brand safety categories News UK offers by over 37% and with this comes the ability to understand fine distinctions between brand safety tagging, rather than bundling topics into elementary and non-relevant categories.
For advertisers this means content that was previously and unfairly considered unsafe can be tapped into as some of the most engaging relevant content made available from a publisher. For example Narr(ai)te ensures boxing content in which the words ‘hit’ and ‘punch’ are present will no longer be tagged irrelevantly as ‘Death & Injury’, thus making the highly engaged audiences in these spaces available for targeting in a brand safe way.
News UK says that Nucleus Narr(ai)te will mitigate against ‘unfair ad blocking’, unlocking more content for advertising.
