The recent article in The Wall Street Journal by Julia Angwin, “Web Ads Appear On Racy Sites Despite Checks,� caused a lot of conversation at Right Media this week. A lot of that discussion centered on Media Guard, which will allow advertisers to keep their content off of sites that do not meet their content requirements. This functionality will be part of the second phase of the Media Guard development, Media Guard – Site Review (MG-SR).

Building out MG-SR and the processes around it will be a daunting task, and one that we are already thinking about. How will we be able to classify the content of all the sites that are in the Yield Manager Marketplace? As an example, how do we classify all of the user-generated content on MySpace, which can be changed and updated at anytime? Do we just classify all user-generated content as such, with no additional classification and effectively make those pages caveat emptor (which we assume will lead most conservative advertisers to choose not to run on pages thus classified)? Will this take so much content essentially non-classified that it ruins the goal of MG-SR? Of particular interest, a recent article in The Economist, “Murdoch’s Space�, discusses some of the issues that MySpace is addressing to be sure it is attractive to advertisers.

I thought that the WSJ article dealt with some much bigger issues than pure content classification, such as network re-selling and advertisers being disintermediated in the buying process, which are beyond the scope of Media Guard. But by tackling these issues of content classification, with MG-SR, we should be able to solve some of the major end problems (ads on inappropriate sites) that advertisers face.

Of course there is a lot more to say about this topic and how we tackle these problems that advertisers face and develop the best solution for them, but for now we are currently focused on getting MG- CR into a live mode - an exciting time! We have several “auditors� who have started and are getting close to the first major lock-down of the classifications for creatives. Then we will move into a beta test with some live ads to get comfortable with the flow and timing. Then after moving into live mode for all creatives, we can really start to focus on creating MG-SR and solving some the problems that advertisers face.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 10th, 2006 at 9:45 pm and is filed under Media Guard. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.