RhythmOne's Platform-Level Integration With Grapeshot Addresses Brand Safety in Real Time

LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM and SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - Oct 24, 2017) - RhythmOne plc (LSE AIM: RTHM, "Company" or "1R"), an advertising technology company that provides streamlined, transparent connections between advertisers and audiences through a combination of differentiated supply, innovative technology and data-driven insights, today announces details of its platform-level integration with Grapeshot, an industry leading software company using advanced probability algorithms to provide data to improve brand safety and to better target advertising campaigns.

Grapeshot's data -- which is integrated directly into RhythmOne's programmatic platform as part of their RhythmGuard technology -- gives RhythmOne the ability to effectively filter content that brands would consider to be objectionable. Grapeshot has built an adaptive page-crawling algorithm which not only determines the value of words on a given page, but also across all pages previously analyzed, and is thus a true learning algorithm that is constantly evolving. As Grapeshot's service servers are co-located in RhythmOne's data centers, brand safety checks first happen at bid-request in real-time, thus ensuring that questionable content won't even enter the RhythmOne ecosystem. Also, due to this co-location, the RhythmOne-Grapeshot integration makes it easier for all previously un-scored sites to be crawled and scored as soon as they enter the ecosystem, thus ensuring that newer sites do not lose out on potential revenue.

"Our unique relationship and integration with RhythmOne is an example of how two leaders within the ad tech ecosystem are working diligently to ensure advertisers can maintain control over the context in which their ads appear," said Ryan McBride, V.P. Platform Partnerships at Grapeshot. "Integrating in this sophisticated manner gives RhythmOne a leg up over other platforms because, in addition to ensuring that advertisers can access real users, RhythmOne also ensures that they are on contextually appropriate sites that advertisers approve. Our partnership demonstrates a level of commitment to brand safety that not all platforms offer."

Using Grapeshot's scoring, RhythmOne categorizes traffic into 4 levels of quality -- premium, high, low and unsafe. Unsafe sites are automatically blocked. The remaining traffic is filtered based on the quality standards of the requesting advertiser. In addition to blocking all recommended "bad" pages, RhythmOne goes further by blocking all pages that come back as "not crawlable" or "not crawled yet," taking immediate steps to block even potentially suspicious traffic. Such standards help ensure no questionable traffic is presented to brands for bidding. RhythmOne then works closely with their publisher partners to ensure their content is being crawled, ranked and in good standing.

Finally, Grapeshot also provides benefits on the demand side. Through the RhythmOne platform, advertisers can target specific categories or keywords that they wish to include or exclude from their campaigns, facilitating micro-targeting around very specific and/or timely content.

"In a programmatic environment, being able to control for brand safety is as important as being able to eliminate fraud or target to specific viewability standards," said Bhaskar Ballapragada, Head of Product at RhythmOne. "Our partnership and deep integration with Grapeshot's technology within our programmatic marketplace is designed to address evolving brand safety concerns and give advertisers peace of mind and control over the context in which their advertising appears."

About RhythmOne
RhythmOne provides streamlined, transparent connections between advertisers and audiences through a combination of differentiated supply, innovative technology and data-driven insights. Founded in 2004 in the UK, the Company pioneered Internet video search and works with digital advertisers, publishers and content providers to offer fully integrated, cross-screen solutions that span desktop and mobile video, rich media, display, social and native advertising. Through its fully integrated programmatic platform, RhythmMax, the Company represents digital advertising inventory across owned, controlled and extended supply sources. The RhythmMax platform includes unique brand safety technology, RhythmGuard, which combines leading third-party verification and proprietary filtering technologies to ensure inventory quality in brand safe environments. RhythmOne's end-to-end platform provides more direct, efficient and effective connections, driving ROI for advertisers and publishers. The Company is headquartered in San Francisco, United States with offices in the US, UK, Europe, APAC and Canada. For more information, please visit www.rhythmone.com.

About Grapeshot
Grapeshot is a US, UK, Singapore and Australia, based privately owned technology provider that assists marketers reach consumers during the moments that influence their decisions and analytics solutions in open and private programmatic environments. Grapeshot delivers tools for brands, publishers, buy-side and supply-side partners using an advanced, Internet page, keyword extraction, algorithm, enabling them to navigate the spectrum of real-time choice via the connective tissue of keywords.