• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, February 27, 2024

Lexus’ media-buying agency, Team One, partnered with media measurement company, DoubleVerify, to help automate manual work through artificial intelligence (AI). Here is how advances in AI are being used to support auto advertisers as brand safety continues to become one of the biggest issues for the world’s largest auto advertisers.

The automaker wanted to ensure ads appeared alongside appropriate content, especially in an election year dominated by contentious and sensitive topics, but managing brand safety is a manual process where marketers manually block specific websites and pieces of content, while the number of channels advertised on continue to rise.

Maintaining Lexus' brand suitability profiles in the past proved labor intensive. Lexus' ad agency, Team One, manually curated more than 10,000 exclusion URLs and about 1,500 exceptions across a variety of campaigns. The team had to check URLs one by one.

That’s until they began working with DoubleVerify to build one brand suitability profile. TeamOne implemented DoubleVerify’s Authentic Brand Suitability (ABS) product for Lexus in October 2022. It provided a way to determine if content or context aligns with the car manufacturer’s values, voice, or audience.

The companies on Tuesday released results from recent campaigns used to support Lexus that establish an automated, centralized brand suitability and fraud profile applied across platforms and partners.

The product is driven by artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), said Charles Gabriel, DoubleVerify West Coast regional VP.

Deep neural networks map out content and programing “like the human brain.” There are features in the AI platform that analyze video and audio frame by frame.

More than 90 content categories are available to choose from -- multiple tiers of risk to categorize. Lexus' agency said implementing the platform reduced media waste and increased safety. Site traffic rose by 3.5-times after the product was implemented.

In pre- and post-analysis, the agency saw viewability rates rise between 85% and 90% from between 70% and 75% within the first two weeks.

Immediately after activating ABS across Lexus' four core campaigns, block rates decreased markedly, dropping by nearly half in the first month of activation.

Team One saw Lexus’ block rate continues to improve throughout the following six months, ending at 2% or lower across all four campaigns. As block rates decreased across all four campaigns, site traffic visits per ad impressions also increased notably, driving more visitors to Lexus.com, the campaigns primary goals.

The companies said results keep improving.