Equativ, a global independent ad platform, has announced an exclusive partnership with Seekr, an artificial intelligence firm that specialises in transparent content evaluation and generation. This alliance marks Seekr's first integration with a supply-side platform and brings a transformative solution to the ad tech industry, resolving the long-standing issue of large-scale content evaluation with contextual clarity and transparency.

This collaborative initiative will empower Equativ's clients to identify more suitable advertising opportunities within its premium, brand-safe inventory. By utilising Seekr's content analysis and scoring capabilities in their private marketplaces, Equativ clients can offer advertisers highly desirable brand-compatible environments. The partnership consequently facilitates expanded audience reach that benefits not only advertisers but also responsible publishers who are committed to maintaining the quality and integrity of their content.

Seekr brings a unique contribution to the collaboration by leveraging its expertise in web-scale search, content processing, pattern recognition, and signals analysis alongside a task-oriented large language model. This unique model enables an accurate understanding of language, encompassing not only word meaning but also context and nuance in both written text and spoken language. Seekr's AI algorithms are adept at detecting a range of signals in online content pointing to brand suitability risk, including unattributed assertions, hostility and incivility, subjectivity, and exaggeration, among others.

Market segments have struggled with conventional brand-safety solutions, often criticised for their overly broad and unreliable nature, which engenders confusion and uncertainty for brands. Even worse, such challenges cost publishers nearly $3 billion in lost revenue. Complicating matters further is the prevalence of "Made for Advertising" sites, websites that emphasize revenue over content quality, besmear brand credibility and undermine the efficacy of ad campaigns.

Gregg Rogers, Senior Director, Curation and Demand Partnerships at Equativ, emphasized the importance of the partnership, "Our commitment to addressing this challenge means we're determined to maximise the value that direct access to our quality, brand-suitable inventory offers. Our partnership with Seekr is a big step forward in cleaning up digital advertising because it gives advertisers more transparency and contextual clarity into online content, which brands need to confidently and safely reach new audiences."

Seekr has recently unveiled Align, an innovative AI-powered tool that enables advertisers to evaluate and rate podcast content effectively based on specific brand safety and suitability criteria. The company plans to expand this platform to assess and score all types of web content, including audio, text and video, essentially making it the comprehensively advanced multi-channel brand suitability tool available.

In response to the new partnership, Rob Clark, President and Chief Technology Officer at Seekr, stated, "Explainability and transparency are critically important in cultivating trust. Our brand suitability solution evaluates web-based content accurately, uniformly, and quickly, and importantly, it allows every stakeholder–advertisers, publishers, and other content producers–to understand exactly what factors are impacting content ratings. We're thrilled to integrate our brand suitability capabilities into Equativ's platform, which runs more than 120 billion auctions daily. Our partnership with Equativ will allow more brands to maximise the impact of their advertising and reach new audiences, with the confidence that their investments are brand safe and brand aligned."