6sense takes fraud protection, brand safety and brand suitability controls seriously by deploying industry best-practices, including a combination of advanced technologies (AI/ML) and human oversight.
Fraud protection is the implementation of algorithms and strategy to detect fraudulent advertising impressions or clicks and to prevent them from incurring unnecessary financial costs for our clients.
Brand safety measures are steps taken to keep our clients’ reputations safe when advertising online, primarily by avoiding placing ads next to inappropriate or extreme content.
Brand suitability builds upon brand safety by allowing clients to opt out of showing ads next to additional categories of content. Decisions about suitability can differ from brand to brand.
We offer comprehensive pre- and post-bid coverage including programmatic bid blocking and post-bid monitoring and removal to protect our clients’ reputations and financial results. Fraud prevention and brand safety are applied to all campaigns by default. Additional brand suitability controls are then available during campaign creation (or editing) to provide advertisers with the ability to exclude selected categories of inventory that may not meet their desired criteria for brand association.
Q: Aren’t all campaigns protected from fraud and for brand safety?
A: Yes, by default, 6sense runs pre- and post-filtering fraud detection (to avoid invalid traffic) and brand safety controls (to block several categories of extreme content) on 100% of campaigns. To achieve this, we combine proprietary in-house machine learning algorithms with implementations of best-in-class third party partnerships, including Double Verify and SSP-based implementations of Human (formerly White Ops).
Default Fraud Prevention: Our goal is to defend your campaigns from invalid traffic costs, sophisticated bot attacks, click fraud and financial abuses. Our fraud prevention solution identifies both general invalid traffic (GIVT) and sophisticated invalid traffic (SIVT). GIVT is traffic typically created by industry crawlers (such as search engine and social media systems) that can be identified and removed. Note that we allow some of this activity, for indexing and verifications, to pass through to landing pages, so you may see activity in your web logs or analytics, but the data is removed from all 6sense reporting and incurs no financial costs. SIVT is more malicious and requires advanced techniques to analyze and identify. 6sense and our security vendors are ever vigilant in analyzing, reporting and flagging new fraudulent data patterns and we block activity and/or do not charge for clicks or impressions identified as at-risk.
Default Brand Safety: Our content controls are powered by both domain-level and page-level analysis using machine learning to block extreme content. The following categories are blocked from all campaigns by default:
Explicit violence | Content that encourages or depicts acts of violence. |
|---|---|
Adult and sexual content | Adult material and content that is pornographic or shows full nudity. |
Hate speech and cyberbullying | Content that is biased, derogatory, or offensive towards any individuals or groups. Content that threatens or may incite violence against individuals or groups within a protected class is also considered Hate Speech. |
Terrorism | Content that encourages acts of terrorism or describes carrying out acts of terrorism in detail. |
High risk weapons | Content that promotes assault weapons, explosives, guns or any products, services, activities or content that could cause serious human harm or injury. |
Extreme and graphic content | Content that has been deemed high-risk across a variety of topics. |
Optional Brand Suitability: Additional restrictions can be layered in to help clients customize their protection according to each brand’s own unique requirements. These selections are offered on an opt-in basis because content suitability often differs from client to client and brand to brand.
Q: Why do some advertisers choose to apply additional brand suitability restrictions?
A: 6sense’s approach is to A.) automatically block content that the majority of our clients agree is unsafe and B.) offer customizable controls over the contextual suitability of additional categories that may be appropriate for some brands, while undesirable for others. Our goal is to empower each self-service client to make choices about their own ideal advertising environment.
Supplemental brand controls can be helpful for advertisers who are more risk-averse than others in specific categories and would prefer to avoid those categories all-together. For instance, some companies choose to avoid all political content due to the risk of associating their brand with possibly polarizing topics, while others value the opportunity to reach audiences engaged in major national news. Similar choices can be made about natural disaster information, user-generated content, pharmaceutical news, etc.
Q: How do I make selections?
A: During campaign setup, you will find the following brand safety and suitability choices under ‘Advanced Targeting’.
Standard Protection (Safe from Fraud and Extreme Content)
Standard Protection + Block Additional Categories
The default is Standard Protection. If you choose to switch to block additional categories, you will be presented with a dropdown select menu and can choose one or more categories to block.
Below are brief definitions of categories that can be blocked:
Celebrity gossip | Gossip and tabloid coverage of celebrities. |
|---|---|
Cults & survivalism | Content about cults, survivalists and preppers. |
Gambling | Content that discusses gambling or provides odds or betting advice. |
Mature content and themes | Content that involves mature topics that may be inappropriate for children, including: content containing explicit language, sexual themes, sexually suggestive images or partial nudity. |
News topic: alcohol and alcoholism | Content that discusses the consumption of alcohol. |
News topic: aviation disasters | Content about catastrophic events involving aviation. This includes both accidental and intentional acts, such as hijackings and other attacks, as well as runway accidents or events that lead to downed crafts. |
News topic: crime | Content about actions that are illegal, criminal or harmful to the general public and are generally forbidden by law. This includes actual criminal actions, as well as allegations. |
News topic: death and injury | Content about all manners of death, severe medical emergency and serious injury. |
News topic: drug abuse | Content about drug use, including use of illegal drugs and abuse of prescription/OTC drugs. |
News topic: hate speech and cyberbullying | Content that discusses hate speech or cyberbullying. This category is not limited to only instances of harmful language or behavior, it also includes content about such language or behavior, such as news coverage about a hate crime or cyberbullying. |
News topic: human made disasters | Content about human-made disaster events that are technological, sociological or environmental with a human cause. Some topics include war, genocide and industrial accidents. |
News topic: natural disasters | Content about natural disasters, which are primarily earth- or disease-related harmful events. Some topics include wildfires, famine, epidemics and pandemics. Content about the consequences and impact of COVID-19 are included. |
News topic: negative financial news | Negative news about the financial industry, including bankruptcies and company failures, and downturns in the economy. |
News topic: negative pharmaceutical news | Negative news about the pharmaceutical industry, including over-the-counter (OTC) and prescription drugs. |
News topic: terrorism | News coverage discussing acts of terrorism, terrorist attacks, terrorist organizations or the facilitation of terrorism. |
News topic: tobacco and e-cigarettes | Content about tobacco and tobacco products, such as cigarettes, cigars, pipes, smokeless tobacco and tobacco smoking simulators such as e-cigarettes. This includes any aspects of this topic, including health, business, politics and lifestyle. |
News topic: vehicle disasters | Content related to vehicle disasters that are accidentally or intentionally-caused. This includes sea and land vehicles, such as boats, buses, cars and trains. |
News topic: violence | Content discussing acts of physical harm or weapons that cause physical harm. The category also includes content related to both legal and illegal violent subjects, such as: violent sports, firearms, shootings, violent crime, animal cruelty and more. |
Supernatural | Content related to supernatural, paranormal or occult topics. |
User-generated content | Forums and user-submitted photos and videos. |
Q: How much does it cost to use these controls?
A: There are no additional fees for Brand Safety and Suitability controls. However, note that blocking more categories of content will reduce the number of daily auctions that your campaigns can bid into and may reduce the daily scale of your campaign’s reach and spend.
Q: Are these solutions accredited?
A: Our safety vendors are accredited by the Media Rating Council (MRC) for detection and blocking for brand safety and suitability within desktop, mobile web and mobile apps.
Q: What campaign types are supported with Brand Safety and Suitability Controls?
A: Controls are available for:
6sense Advertising
6sense Contextual Targeting
6sense Visitor Retargeting
Controls work across multiple platforms:
Desktop
Mobile web
Mobile apps