MANTIS Startup to Disrupt Online Advertising Industry with Advanced Online Video Vetting AI Technology

Mantis-ai.com will launch its Artificial Intelligence (AI) tool for the first time, which will be available for advertisers during the #vivatech conference in Paris, May 2018 at startup booth: D17-001, Viva Technology Paris 24-26 May, 2018.
Over the past year, SMOs released several official reports surrounding decisions by the largest global advertisers to withdraw ad campaigns from the top four online video publishers, due to failures in online video content vetting and lack of advertiser control over ad placement within relevant content.
Mantis is a video moderation system that uses state-of-the-art AI techniques to identify video content that is relevant for advertisers through a highly efficient content vetting system. The Mantis vetting system detects, classifies and categorizes relevant content based on specified brand attributes and characteristics, ensuring brand safety and efficient spending of online advertising budgets.
Feras Maddah the CEO says, “Advertisers will now have the option of applying pressure on publishers to only place ads in videos that adhere to a brand’s specified ‘safe list.’ This new tool will allow advertisers to conduct online video campaigns more effectively and efficiently, securing brand perception associated with selected content. Within the next 3 months, ongoing trials will conclude and results of the trials will be published with full reports on Mantis’ performance.”
Dr. (PhD) Bernard Ghanem, the Project Director for Mantis says, “Mantis presents an innovative tool for the online advertising world. The system uses sophisticated AI techniques developed in-house to translate brand-safe attributes (similar to those found in an advertising campaign brief) into visual cues that can be very quickly found and recognized in a video. Mantis technology can be used by advertisers in two main ways: (1) to quickly earmark thousands of videos that follow brand specific attributes for ad placement or (2) to assess whether videos with ads already placed in them are coherent with these brand attributes.
Maddah adds, “Mantis will significantly help reduce wastage in advertising spending caused by ad spillovers onto irrelevant or brand-unsafe content and, in turn, improve budget allocation”.
Dr. Ghanem outlines two major benefits of Mantis, “First, Mantis can determine if an activity or cue in a video can be considered brand-safe or unsafe, and consequently, alert the advertiser to whether or not an ad should be placed in that specific video.
Second, Mantis is equipped with an added-value feature where ads can be placed at specific time intervals in a video based on its relevance and favorability to the brand. For example, Mantis can enable advertisers to embed banner ads for sportswear at the exact time a basketball dunk happens in a video across the publisher’s platform. Mantis does this by automatically detecting when that specific activity (basketball dunk) occurs in the video and earmarks it for ad placement.”