Mediahuis Ireland and Mediahuis UK (collectively called hereinafter “Mediahuis”) take a zero-tolerance approach to the misplacement of ads in their position as being the trusted source for independent news, expert opinions, and in providing innovative commercial solutions to the Irish market. We operate to strict brand safety principles, in line with our motto as being guardians of privacy, to provide sensitive, responsible coverage whilst taking our client’s brand safety very seriously.

In line with this approach, we have put multiple measures in place to ensure that all content remains independent while providing our clients space to advertise in a brand-safe environment across all our online properties. Such measures, like our takedown policy, content tagging approach, content verification tooling, and more, have been put in place to ensure that we continue to deliver on our SLAs to our clients without adversely affecting the client’s brand.

We adhere to the following key principles in ensuring brand safety across our properties:

• Suppliers of media are vetted under a strict, independent process to ensure the best practice and quality are upheld and can explain the process that form the basis of specific provisions and/or the reasonable endeavours to protect our clients.
• The placement of advertising will be identified by contract and should not support inappropriate or illegal content or services.
• Media will be optimised to minimise fraud, ad misplacement, and optimum viewability performance.
• We will carry out 3rd part authentication of all media by an industry leading verification tool/s, and any incremental solutions.
• We have a responsibility to preserve our clients’ interests and reserve the right to cancel or amend any media booking if media quality standards are not met.

In the unlikely event that an advertisement appears in an inappropriate context for the clients, we will ensure that the advertisement is taken down at the earliest. For any further queries on our approach to brand safety, please contact digitalops@mediahuis.ie.

Contextual Categories 

We use Oracle Grapeshot for Brand Safety and Contextual Categories. Our technology crawls pages then uses information retrieval processes to determine the core content of the page. We then compare that content to “contextual segments”, sets of carefully compiled words and phrases concerning specific topics, to determine if there is a match, and how strong the match is. We have 24 different contextual segments, auto, business, economy, education, entertainment, event, family, fashion, finance, food, health, home, law, news, politics, science, shopping, society, sport, tech, travel, sentiment, others, and safety.

Maximum Protection

We apply gv_safe by default to provide the most brand safe measures and avoid ad misplacement.

Content that has been successfully processed, matches at least one standard (gs_) segment, and does not match any of the standard unsafe (gv_) segments6 is identified as safe (gv_safe) and offered for targeting.

Article ID exclusions

We have in our control the ability to limit ad serving or remove ads from specific articles using its article ID.

Removal of Video Ad call

At the time of publication, our Editorial team may deem certain video content unsafe for brands and therefore may remove the ad call from the player.