Mantis Launches ‘Mantis Video’ to Help Publishers Compete for Video-First Briefs

Brand safety has often been a thorn in the side of premium publishers. In theory, it should work in their favour. Big media companies often emphasise the safety of running ads alongside professionally produced content compared to the wild west of social media. But in practice, news and magazine brands still frequently see their content essentially demonetised as clumsy brand safety implementations filter out perfectly safe content. We still hear plenty of stories of football post-match reports being blocked because they contain words like ‘shoot’ and ‘attack’.

Back in 2019, UK news group Reach took matters into its own hands, launching its own solution Mantis, in collaboration with IBM Watson. Mantis uses AI and machine learning to analyse written articles, giving advertisers a more nuanced way of managing the content their ads appear next to – one which can tell the difference between the ‘shot’ of a gunman and the ‘shot’ of a centre forward. This also allows for more sophisticated contextual categorisation, which can go beyond IAB categories.

This morning, Mantis has announced the launch of Mantis Video, a new product which brings that same deep contextual understanding to online video. The company says the new tool will help publishers and broadcasters classify, protect, and monetise their video inventory at scale.

In essence, Mantis Video watches a piece of content frame-by-frame, and then uses AI to generate an in-depth summary of the video. Mantis’s AI contextual and brand safety technology analyses this summary to understand exactly what is happening within that piece of video content, in the same way it would analyse a regular written article. It can then apply its ‘Red, Green, Amber’ brand safety classifications, and bucket content into custom contextual categories.

 
Fiona Salmon, managing director of Mantis, says this will help boost monetisation of video content, giving buyers a more reliable set of signals to trade against. “The devil is in the detail when it comes to video, because you’re usually reliant on metadata or subtitle data, which isn’t always correct,” she told VideoWeek. “Subtitles can be great, but they don’t tell the whole story.”

Competing for video-first briefs

For many of the publishers Mantis works with, including ESI Media, Immediate Media, LADbible, and Nine News, video is a big part of their offering. And across the publisher spectrum, video is growing in importance, as it eats up an ever greater portion of audiences’ time online. Reach itself has been investing heavily in its video capabilities, with executives frequently commenting on the strategic importance of video.

There’s also growing demand on the buy-side. “I go into meetings with holdcos every week of the year, and over the last two years those conversations have become more and more video driven,” said Salmon. For a lot of brands, YouTube remains the first port of call for their video budgets, and publishers are hungry to compete for that spend.

But as with written content, inaccurate brand safety classifications can end up demonetising publishers’ content. “A news publisher might run a video showing grainy CCTV footage of someone holding a knife just before a stabbing,” explained Salmon. “But then a company like Immediate Media has lots of recipe content, which shows a knife cutting through ingredients. Contextual technology which isn’t nuanced enough can’t pick out the difference between those two clips. But one is suitable for advertising, and the other isn’t, so it’s important those two videos are treated differently.”

Even where brand safety isn’t an issue, contextual technology can be important to help media companies maximise their video revenues. “In the face of algorithmic changes, publishers are looking for higher engagement from their committed users,” said Ben Pheloung, general manager of Mantis. “Video is a big part of their play, and they need to be able to prove to advertisers that they understand what their video content is. They need a narrative around what exactly their video sale is, beyond it simply being all video content across their website.”

Flexibility is a big part of Mantis’s offering here. Publishers can bucket their video inventory into custom contextual categories which can be much more granular than standard IAB taxonomy, helping them sell more unique packages to advertisers. “Where the IAB taxonomy might be ‘sport’, we can name players and teams, if the category is ‘gaming’, we can name specific games and characters in those games,” said Salmon. “And going deeper in that way leads to much better performance.”

The Red, Green, Amber brand safety classification can also be customised on both the brand side and the publisher side, and can be tailored to specific sections of publisher sites. “We need to treat the front page of The Independent differently from the culture section, because film reviews talking about death and suffering versus hard news talking about death and suffering need to be treated very differently,” said Pheloung. “It’s a way to make those environments safe for advertisers, while not penalising publishers for publishing good, high quality journalism.”

CTV on the cards

As Mantis Video rolls out to market, the company is looking at tangential opportunities for where the technology can be used.

One immediate major use case is in helping publishers filter through their libraries of video content. “There’s a massive opportunity there, where content editors can search through reams and reams of archive content to find a relevant clip to attach to an article,” said Salmon. This in turn has commercial consequences, as it helps publishers to run more video on-site, and therefore potentially sell more video ads alongside those clips.

A few media companies have also approached Mantis asking about possible alternative uses for the technology. Some are looking to vet the safety and suitability of the ads themselves, to ensure they’re not accepting any inappropriate or risky ad creative. Others are interested in using it to pick out prime positions for ad breaks within longer content.

This latter use case approaches CTV territory, which is a whole other arena for Mantis to explore — and where buyers frequently complain of a lack of quality content signals. Mantis Video isn’t applicable to CTV yet, but CTV is on the cards.

“CTV is what we’re setting our sights on next, we’re in our early forays into understanding the space and what’s going on there,” said Pheloung. “There’s a lot of CTV content which buyers don’t really understand, and they don’t know what they’re buying against, so that’s what we’re going to try to solve for next.”