News UK, like many publishers, was seeing over-zealous blocking of its content from advertising campaigns for brand safety reasons. This discrepancy was caused by brand safety tools failing to grasp nuanced meanings in content, instead scanning for keywords from block lists.

The mis-tagging of content was limiting monetisation opportunities for News UK, particularly in current affairs editorial, and negatively impacting its revenues. Furthermore, it was limiting scale for advertisers and preventing them from reaching some of its most deeply engaged readers.

News UK partnered with illuma to build a new solution, Nucleus Narr(ai)te, with the aim of up-ending the way content is tagged for commercial activation.

Using illuma’s AI technology, Nucleus Narr(ai)te deep-reads content taking full context into consideration, along with mediatitle-specific tone of voice and style. Narr(ai)te then trains advanced machine learning models in order to continually improve contextual accuracy. Any areas of doubt are flagged to the publisher for clarification; a process known as ‘human in the loop’, which further drives up accuracy over time.

The result is that tagging is now more cohesive between editorial and monetisation. News UK has since seen a significant increase in available brand-safe inventory, allowing the publisher greater monetisation opportunities, and enabling advertisers to access suitable content that would previously have been blocked.

With a more comprehensive understanding of content, News UK is also now offering more granular and precise segments, driving up accuracy for brands and limiting wastage.

Since the launch of Nucleus Narr(ai)te, News UK publications have seen an average +20% increase in the amount of available content deemed ‘brand safe’. There has also been a significant increase in segment accuracy – some as much as 25% (The Sun, Beauty & Skincare); or 20% (The Times, Sports).

From the brand perspective, tests show that the enhanced contextual nuance is delivering up to +27.7% increase in CTR, and up to +38.9% increase in attention (see additional information). As a result of this enhanced accuracy for both avoidance and targeting, Nucleus Narr(ai)te is shown to be increasing revenue opportunities for News UK.

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