eMarketer's Sean Creamer sat down with DoubleVerify CEO and President Wayne Gattinella to discuss the rise of fake news sites and how DV protects advertisers from having their ads appearing adjacent to this content.

"Hyperbolic and fake news sites not only court millions of viewers, but they are also shared voraciously on social media sites, profiting from disinformation. eMarketer’s Sean Creamer spoke with Wayne Gattinella, CEO and president of DoubleVerify, a provider of viewability and brand safety authentication tools, about how brands feel about the plethora of this content and the actions they take to disassociate themselves from it.

eMarketer: How do advertisers view brand safety?

Wayne Gattinella: Brand safety concerns relate to advertisers not fully understanding the context of a site’s content until it’s too late. You can have a perfectly appropriate, ethical news site that an advertiser would want to be spending on any day of the week. However, on a particular day, there might be a story that they don’t want their ad to appear next to—not because the site is inappropriate, but because the story is inappropriate.

eMarketer: How do you apply brand safety to user-generated video content?

Gattinella: It’s breaking down the context of a particular user-generated video, classifying it right at the get-go and determining on a real-time basis whether it’s appropriate or inappropriate.

“Brand safety for video means operating the technology on scale and also at a granular enough level that you’re able to flag and catch questionable content before an ad starts to run.”

Video is more complex than the display environment. User-generated content presents its own complexities, because it is real-time content created in huge scale on YouTube. Brand safety for video means operating the technology on scale and also at a granular enough level that you’re able to flag and catch questionable content before an ad starts to run."

Read the Q&A here.