Google Updates DoubleClick Verification: Ad Blocking, Spam Filtering, Movie-Style Content Ratings

Today, Google-owned DoubleClick rolled out eight updates to its Verification product to address concerns about brand safety and give advertisers more control over and accounting of where their ads appear online.

Here’s a quick rundown of the features Google is focusing on.

Ad Blocking

There are several features around ad blocking. Advertisers can add to the pre-built set of exclusion lists (politics, violence, adult, etc.) and create their own custom categories (called Custom classifiers) of content next to which they don’t want their ads to appear. For example, a cruise line may exclude content about cruise ship accidents and ship-borne illness breakouts to avoid repeating scenarios of cruise holidays being advertised next to stories of the Concordia grounding.

Ad serving can be blocked on both reservation and programmatic buys on display, mobile web and video inventory (in-app is not included here).

Spam Filtering

As part of this effort, Google announced updated spam filtering and fraud protection features — powered in part by it’s acquisition of fraud monitoring and analysis firm spider.io. Google says it has over 100 engineers working on fraud detection. Google has updated the spam filtering piece of DoubleClick Verification with pre-and post-bid filtering capabilities.

Target Content Based On Movie-Like Ratings

Google is also instituting a digital ratings classification similar to movie ratings. Advertisers can bid on inventory based on ratings labels: “DL-G” is content suitable for general audiences, “DL-PG” is equivalent to PG movie rating, “DL-T” is akin to PG-13 and  “DL-MA” is for mature audiences. The new Digital Content Labels apply ratings to inventory on DoubleClick, YouTube, GDN and AdMob.