Integral Ad Science acquires AI-powered video classification company Context

Today, digital ad verification platform Integral Ad Science (IAS) announced its acquisition of Paris-based content classification company Context. Context uses AI to classify images and video seen across digital channels, including social media and CTV.

IAS will integrate Context’s AI-driven technology with its own Context Control suite, which enables marketers to target and deliver ads in suitable, safe contexts.

The acquisition helps accelerate IAS’s product roadmap toward providing contextual solutions that increase marketers’ precision and flexibility in optimizing campaigns, according to the company.

With the acquisition, IAS will add several teams of data scientists, analysts and engineers located in France and Poland to their global staff.

Why we care. The CTV landscape especially continues to grow, offering many more ad opportunities for marketers on streaming services and ad-supported video on demand (AVOD). Viewers are scattered across all these environments, and to avoid risky contexts for brands, there’s a greater need for automated AI tools that can steer the ship at scale. Same goes for the virtual minefield of brand risk that marketers have all experienced on social.

Video content can be extremely captivating for audiences, but it is also largely unstructured. It’s much easier to generate a list of offensive keywords in written content that an advertiser should avoid. To process and tag video requires sophisticated intelligence that can recognize contexts that are damaging to brands. But this also means that there are many opportunities for positive contexts that publishers and brands don’t know about until the video has been catalogued. The real future in CTV is when these opportunities can be identified during live broadcasts like sports events that draw big audiences.

Dig deeper: 2022 Predictions: CTV and cross-channel advertising