CANNES — Depending on who you talk to, two-bit news sites that play fast and loose with the truth swung last year’s US presidential election.
But they also swung advertisers’ ire toward ad-tech platforms that, for a time, seemed unable to stop brands funding the fakers.
That is why Wayne Gattinella introduced a new way to stop the practice. At the end of last year, Gattinella’s company DoubleVerify, which aims to describe the content against which ads may be served, added a fake news detector.
“Given the political environment in the united States last year, there are hundreds and hundreds of new sites cropping us with very politically-charged headlines and links that had a hint of something that was surprising and … really not fact-based,” the DoubleVerify CEO tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “Brands started finding themselves showing up on questionable sites.”
So DoubleVerify included a checker for what it calls “inflammatory politics”, part of its DV Digital Impression Quality suite and open to programmatic buying platforms.
“Our technology is able to identify the context of the site and the page based on either the URL string being fed through … and, with our code inside that particular publisher, can also look at other components of the page to determine its context.”
