Scope3’s Anne Coghlan on using AI to reimagine media buying and brand safety

What happens when AI becomes so affordable and efficient that it can run on every ad impression?

At a time when advertisers are focused on brand safety, supply path efficiency and the nuances of programmatic media buying, AI is emerging as an ally that can help marketers tackle it all and more, thanks to the promise of more powerful automation and greater customization.

Last week, advertisers got a glimpse of that AI-powered future as Scope3 unveiled two new products aimed at solving “some of the real problems within how ad tech works structurally,” according to Co-founder and COO Anne Coghlan: an Agentic Media Platform and an AI-powered Brand Standards product.

“The use of AI is going to be an inevitability,” Coghlan tells The Current.

The Agentic Media Platform lets advertisers bring or create their own AI agents, based on custom data and algorithms, designed to help media buyers make better decisions and reduce buying complexity.

Brand Standards replaces traditional keyword blocking by using large language models (LLMs) to analyze content, aiming to make media buying safer while helping publishers monetize more of their content.

The launches come as open internet players look to streamline ad buying while brand safety concerns mount across walled gardens and traditional verification providers.

With the Agentic Media Platform, Scope3 is creating an “operating system for agents” to handle tasks from research and analysis to media execution and ad-checking.

In practice, that means a “universal custom algorithm platform” that lets brands deploy their preferred data and custom algorithms across the programmatic supply path, for example, by integrating a Newton Research agent to optimize a campaign running on a demand-side platform (DSP). “What we’re talking about here really is an abstraction layer within the way that media gets bought and sold,” Coghlan explains.

The Brand Standards product is built on top of the Agentic Media Platform. The idea is to push brands to look beyond keyword blocking for brand safety.

“You’re missing out on so much stuff if you’re just taking the keywords at face value,” Coghlan says. “What if … we could provide a brand with the opportunity to tailor and create a model, and then send an agent out into the media buying ecosystem so that the agent could check every single impression and understand whether the content was relevant or not for that brand? But importantly, the agent gives reasoning.”

On the publisher side, the product can perform a brand safety analysis for illegal and offensive content. There is also an option to create brand-specific custom models that generate brand suitability scores, helping publishers understand why some content may not be monetized.

“This is a reimagining of how to actually fix the problem of brand safety and suitability in a post-GARM world,” Coghlan adds.

Brand Standards puts Scope3 in direct competition with Integral Ad Science and DoubleVerify, with CEO and Co-founder Brian O’Kelley telling Digiday that Scope3 has “full brand safety capability that is equivalent to what they’ve done.”

“It’s early to say we’re going to ‘x’ the business with these two products,” Coghlan says. Still, she thinks their value will be apparent to advertisers who want to reduce inefficiencies, improve brand safety and word towards a better return on their ad dollars.