Have you noticed lately that everyone in this ad network business says they offer great, transparent, handpicked inventory?  Everyone calls it Premium.  But in the end it winds up being self-certification and adding no real value beyond perceived value.  And now LucidMedia has launched a Verified Inventory program.  We are saying our inventory is safe for brands and that we can accurately target 14,000 specific content categories. You can find out more about brand protection in this Adotas article called A Display Advertising Safety Net. So how is this any different from all the other networks out there?  The difference is in the how, not the what or the why.  The what (verifying inventory) and the why (for brand safety) is the same across the board.  Every network says their media is checked for brand safety.  And everyone has the same reason.  Get more big advertiser spend.  That’s the common what and why in the industry.  It’s the how that is unique to this new program.  We launched this program not because we do it like everyone else, we have this program because we do it differently.  To be specific, we use the most robust and patented form of natural language processing at the pre-impression page level to better determine true meaning.  But how is that different?  Most networks spot check a top level domain list as their way of making their inventory brand safe.  You begin to see the degrees of brand protection available to advertisers and the intricate subtleties that make it confusing.  There’s a huge difference in the degree of safety provided between the two methods.  And every other network usually says they categorize for accurate relevance matching of ads to content because everyone knows that engagement and relevance are directly related.  But what most other networks really do is ask the publisher to self-certify their inventory and then they push it out in those same self-certified categories.  But we look at the words and phrases on the page in real-time and tag it with a far more accurate and granular category before we serve it.  Everyone has the same what and why but it’s the varying degrees of how that makes our program different.  But we go so much further too.  We even filter out pages with objectionable concepts as defined by our clients.  We also categorize our inventory into 14 different classes of media to filter against or target to a specific type of pages like a blogs, news sites, enthusiast site, or shopping sites.  So the story here is not that we are doing the same thing, the real story is in the lengths we go to verify our inventory versus what everyone else does.  They are two very different stories.  And that is why we created the Verified Program, because we do it differently and with a much higher degree of quality.