CHEQ
AI-Driven Brand Safety in Digital Media

Imagine you’re the CMO of a big brand, spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year on digital advertising. You want to track every ad-view, understand the viewer’s profile, monitor your conversion funnel and generate insight which will allow you to improve ad performance. The whole point of digital advertising is to afford the advertiser control and insight that was never available in traditional advertising. Ironically, control (or lack thereof) has become the biggest pain point for online advertisers. In fact, they struggle to control who’s viewing their ads (up to 30 percent of all online ads are served to fake bot users) and where their ads are being placed (most fortune 500 brands serve their ads repeatedly alongside violent, graphic and offensive content).

Enter CHEQ, founded by Guy Tytunovich—a former military intelligence officer for the Israeli Defense Forces who specialized at state-level cybersecurity. After concluding his military career, Tytunovich went on to launch several companies in the digital media space, until finally realizing that the knowledge he’d accumulated in cybersecurity, NLP and Deep-Learning could be applied to solve the headaches of digital advertising. So, he utilized his expertise and founded CHEQ, the next-gen Ad Verification company which uses AI to protect the world’s biggest marketers from fraudulent traffic, and negative brand association.

“For 20 years, advertisers thought that there was no way to control the placement and positioning of advertisements,” informs Tytunovich. “As several thousand websites could not be manually reviewed to check the placement of advertisements and ensure that no negative associations are formed, AI becomes imperative to digital media,” he explains. CHEQ replaces the manual approach of blacklisted keywords, articles and websites reported by the client. The company has heralded an autonomous Ad Verification revolution ending the placement of ads near objectionable content in real-time.

CHEQ also deploys sophisticated algorithms and Honeypots to find anomalies in the traffic, identifying whether a user is human or not.

Our goal is to restore advertiser confidence in online advertising by ensuring that ads are placed in the right environment and visible to the real, authentic human users

The company’s robust anti-fraud solution processes significantly more data (700 unique parameters) than other players in the market and does so in absolute real-time. “Our clients add a line of code to the ad snippet that automatically blocks the advertiser from serving to fake bot users,” says Tytunovich.

The platform’s ability to process so much data and analyze content contextually in such little time, stems from its rapid use of Neural-NLP engines. This allows CHEQ to act as a preemptive solution which can make smart decisions in real-time, as opposed to first-generation solutions who are limited to (primarily) monitoring damage after the fact.

One of CHEQ’s clients, a huge global ad marketplace, needed to ensure their advertisers that ads were being placed alongside appropriate content and not served to fake bot users. The client had previously worked with a first-generation ad verification vendor, which simplistically categorized content based on keyword lists. This rules-based system proved ineffective, as many ads continuously surfaced on articles about rape, violence and other unsavory content. With CHEQ, the company instead created custom content categories and classifiers for their advertisers, allowing them to avoid appearing alongside content they deemed “brand damaging”. Our client discovered that many of the false-positives they had in the past were now non-existent,” says Tytunovich.

With time, CHEQ seeks to increase the transparency of the digital ad ecosystem so that advertisers, publishers, and agencies can be more confident about their marketing practices. Having uncovered criminal activity in the past, the company is also providing tools to law enforcement officials so that miscreants can be stopped. “Our goal is to restore advertiser confidence in online advertising by ensuring that ads are placed in the right environment and visible to the real, authentic human users,” concludes Tytunovich. “Advertisers deserve control, and the only way to achieve that, is by introducing AI-driven tech which can address the issues accurately, autonomously and at huge scale.”