When 56 per cent of your Euro 2024 sports coverage gets blocked from advertising because it contains the words "shoot", "shootout" and "shot", you know there's a problem with the system.

This was the reality facing Reach and other news publishers as brand safety technology began blocking vast swathes of quality journalism from monetisation.

The solution? Reach decided to build its own technology.

Fiona Salmon, managing director of Mantis Solutions, and Ben Pheloung, general manager, spoke to the Emerging Tech Network about why Reach chose to develop proprietary brand safety technology – and what other publishers can learn from their experience.

Traditional brand safety tools like DoubleVerify and IAS use keyword-based blocking technology. While designed with good intentions, this approach lacks nuance and context, leading to absurd outcomes.

"BBC Good Food gets blocked for the keywords 'chicken breast' and 'knife'," Salmon explains. "Immediate Media is 99.9 per cent brand safe and suitable, yet so much content gets blocked."

The issue stems from the origin of these technologies. "There's tech that's built for agency buyers sitting on the buyer side, and it gets repurposed for publishers," says Pheloung. "Often that technology is less good, it's less managed, and it's harder to get anything done or changed as a........

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