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Brand Safety Policy & Guidelines

 

This Brand Safety Policy was last modified on Sep 11, 2020.

 

As per our Editorial Standards, “Narcity.com’s mission is to inform and entertain millennials with local news stories. Our writers and editors strive to create nonpartisan and conversational articles that present a clear picture of events and trends. Our headlines, social media, and articles create an engaging, accurate, and candid presentation of the news to offer a fresh alternative to traditional media.”

 

We believe in offering the most relevant, important and time-sensitive information to our viewers, and sometimes that will mean publishing content that some advertisers could label as sensitive.

 

This policy aims to clarify our brand safety guidelines and how ads appear against our content. Our Brand Safety Policy applies to “direct sales,” “private marketplace” and “programmatic-guaranteed” display and video bookings.


For direct, programmatic guaranteed and PMP bookings:

  • If an article contains breaking news of a tragedy, disaster or terrorist incident, as well as cases where the content is of a sensitive nature, our editorial teams review the content before publishing and, if appropriate, remove all ads from the content by tagging them as “NSFW” so buyers will never appear on them.
  • We have developed an algorithm that pulls keywords from our articles automatically and makes them available to be targeted using our ad server in real time. Advertisers can request that specific keywords are excluded from their campaigns.

 

For open marketplace:

  • Buyers are responsible for excluding keywords or content that they do not want their advertising to appear next to. Most buyers have advanced capabilities integrated through their DSP (or their agency’s DSP) that allow them to exclude keywords or content. If you’re unsure about how to do this, contact your DSP service provider.
  • If you do not have that technology available, or are not sure what this means, we recommend reaching out to our team.

 

For branded content:

  • Upon request of our branded and sponsored content partners, we can replace all ads on their editorials (or videos) with “house” ads, which can be provided by the client or Narcity. 
  • Upon request and sign-off from your Account Manager, we can also block certain ad categories or certain brands from appearing or being able to bid on ad placements around and inside your branded content.
    • Important: This is a new feature only available for brands and categories labelled via Google Ad Exchange. In some instances, excluded brands can pass through this filter. If that happens, please contact us.

 

Making sure your ads are actually seen

We take ad fraud very seriously and we employ active supply path optimization (SPO) with all of our client-side and server-side bidding partners to ensure only approved and high-quality vendors are allowed to bid on our inventory. This drastically reduces the chances that your ads will appear alongside spammy or low-quality ads.

 

We offer 100% viewable impressions on direct deals. This ensures ads are actually seen by real users.

 

As well as reviewing our supply partners (SSPs) regularly we also review the ad load speed and viewability metrics regularly to make sure we always perform above 70% viewability on average* in the open marketplace and above 80%* with programmatic guaranteed deals. Once our technology permits, we will offer 100% viewable impressions on our programmatic deals.

 

*Viewability metrics are according to Google Ad Manager viewability standards.