March 12th-March 18th

Below is a roundup of last week’s notable industry news, with summaries and our opinions. (A)I drink your milkshake!

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Scope3 to take on brand-safety companies with new AI tech
Source: Marketing Brew
March 13th, 2025

Summary: Sustainability startup Scope3 is expanding beyond carbon emissions tracking to tackle brand safety with AI. Last week, it launched Brand Standards, an AI-powered brand safety and suitability product, which will live within the Scope3 Agentic Media Platform, a hub for AI-driven advertising tools and agents. Like “Context Agents”!

Brand Standards is an AI model that customizes brand safety to a company’s unique specifications. Instead of relying on outdated keyword block lists, it scans website text and images in real time to offer more precise brand safety controls. Scope3 built this tool following its acquisition of verification company Adloox, and it's already integrated with The Trade Desk, Google, Dotdash Meredith, and Index Exchange.

Meanwhile, the Agentic Media Platform allows publishers, ad tech platforms, curators, and agencies to create and sell AI-enabled media products. Scope3 claims its AI agents can improve media quality, reduce carbon-heavy ad inventory, and eliminate fraudulent “made-for-advertising” content. Amazon DSP is the first to integrate, with Index Exchange, Equativ, MiQ, Elcano, and Azerion lined up for testing next month.

The launch comes at a time when traditional brand safety players like DoubleVerify (DV) and Integral Ad Science (IAS) are under fire from advertisers and regulators over their effectiveness. Meanwhile, platforms like Meta and X are scaling back content moderation, putting more responsibility on advertisers to control brand safety

Opinion: O'Kelley couldn't have picked a better moment to disrupt the brand safety sector. The timing is 🤌 for three key reasons:

1. The incumbents are under fire: The DoubleVerify-IAS duopoly is taking heat from researchers, regulators, and advertisers. The House Judiciary Committee report and X lawsuit literally led to GARM disbanding. Whatever they’re doing—it ain’t working. Yet, they’re still charging the entire industry a “tax” for their tech.

2. Brand safety still matters: According to Forrester, 59% of marketing executives believe consumers care less about brand safety than before. Yet the stakes for getting it wrong (Congressional hearings & PR nightmares, anyone?) have never been higher.

3. The tech is ripe for reinvention: Legacy brand safety relies on static keyword lists and category blocking. But the internet is dynamic. Content changes constantly, and context is everything. AI—if done right—offers a more adaptive, real-time solution.

Scope3’s early integrations with Google, The Trade Desk, and Index Exchange give Brand Standards immediate credibility. And having Dotdash Meredith on board suggests that publishers see the value in more nuanced brand safety solutions that don’t just nuke their revenue.

Brand safety is an obvious first use case for this tech, but it's easy to see how agentic AI capabilities will extend to creative, planning, targeting, optimization, and measurement. That’s the premise of Scope3’s Agentic Media Platform, as O'Kelley explained in his blog post and during a Q&A at Marketecture LIVE in NYC on Monday (which will be aired as Friday’s Marketecture Podcast). Brand safety is just a way for Scope3 to start getting traction.

O'Kelley is generally considered the “Godfather of ad tech”🔒and has a knack for spotting industry inflection points. The explosion of AI is obviously an inflection point, and an upstart like Scope3 has the flexibility and opportunity to disrupt the entire industry. Whether it succeeds depends on if it can deliver meaningfully better outcomes than existing solutions and navigate the increasingly treacherous political waters around brand safety and content moderation, especially with not-always-reliable AI tech.

That said, we trust “the Godfather” knows what he’s doing. Scope3 just went from being a kind of interesting sustainability company to a do-everything-advertising-related-using-AI company. This is big.

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