Criteo unlocks access to wider brand-safe inventory with Oracle

The world’s leading commerce media platform helps brands boost sales, gain more app installs, and reach consumers through impactful advertising. Criteo’s 20,000-plus customers serve up 4 billion ads per day across a 1.2K+ direct access network of media owners, giving brands the ability to reach a truly global customer base. 

Criteo and the advertising industry at large were facing unchartered territory in the wake of 2020’s volatile news cycle. For advertisers, this translated into sweeping brand safety measures to ensure their ads were not appearing alongside negative content. For example, some advertisers were sensitive about news cycles related to COVID.

However, ad blocking at the keyword level for “covid19” has the potential to reduce the amount of available media content by nearly 50%, when many other areas of a publisher’s site still offer safe, relevant, and rewarding inventory. In fact, more than 60% of the content containing the keyword “covid” or “coronavirus” is considered safe by advertising standards. Too often, these brand safety strategies were having a dramatic impact on ad performance.

Alternatively, for trusted news outlets that promote safe and neutral content, these brand safety measures were having a significant impact on monetization opportunities. A recent study by Oracle of Criteo’s inventory showed that, “most, 87%, of Criteo’s news inventory is considered exempt from any negative news cycles (wars, terrorism, catastrophes, etc.) according to industrywide brand safety practices.” Committed to brand safety and transparency while also supporting trusted news outlets, Criteo recognized that its brand safety capabilities were too broad. The company needed more ad blocking control for two stakeholders: advertisers and publishers.

In searching for a brand safety partner, Criteo’s evaluation took into consideration many factors, including  precision of the solution, the integration type, and how the product would interact with existing systems.

Oracle’s key differentiator was the granularity of Oracle Contextual Intelligence, part of the Oracle Advertising and Customer Experience suite of applications. Its ability to apply contextual logic at the individual page level showed Criteo that Oracle would directly answer the concerns clients were expressing every day.

Also, Oracle Contextual Intelligence enabled clients to exclude specific content categories.

Oracle Advertising brings the most accurate contextual solutions to Criteo’s global brand safety offering, which allows advertisers to evaluate content more precisely to ensure that their advertisements are not associated with negative content. With the adoption of Oracle Contextual Intelligence, Criteo’s advertisers now have the ability to go beyond traditional keyword blocking to fully understand the context of every webpage. Compared to straight keyword blocking, by using this smart approach, Criteo has empowered advertisers to recover 3 to 4 times the number of lost display opportunities.

A more nuanced approach to brand safety, such as implementing it at the page level rather than blocking entire domains, will allow advertisers to better support news outlets as well. Considering that 1 in 5 domains are featured news inventory, contextual targeting opens brand safe inventory by mitigating the impact of ad blocking from what could have been as high as 50% of sites to an average of 10%.

Since the migration to Oracle, Criteo has experienced a rise in demand for contextual targeting. It can empower brands to create safer and more transparent advertising environments. In fact, 30% of all of Criteo’s strategic clients have adopted customizable Oracle Contextual Intelligence solutions for brand safety, and Criteo expects this number to continue rising as the company educates clients on the right level of protection to meet their brand standards.