Published on: June 5, 2026
London, UK, 5 June 2026 – Mantis, a leading provider of contextual advertising solutions with built-in brand safety and suitability, has announced the launch of Mantis Video, a new AI-powered platform designed to help publishers and broadcasters classify, protect, and monetise video inventory at scale.
As advertising demand continues to shift toward video, many broadcasters and publishers are sitting on valuable inventory that remains difficult to sell effectively. Inconsistent metadata, limited contextual signals, and overly broad brand safety controls have left large volumes of video content under-monetised.
Mantis Video is designed to solve that problem by analysing the video itself, rather than relying on metadata or transcripts alone. The platform scans content frame by frame, processing visual scenes and objects, audio cues, speech, brand and entity recognition, as well as narrative themes to create structured intelligence for every asset.
For broadcasters and publishers, Mantis’ tool offers a flexible and granular approach to apply custom contextual categories to their inventory. This goes beyond the IAB standard taxonomy to deliver better performance results through highly targeted packages for advertisers. For example, a standard taxonomy may provide broad categories such as Sport, whereas Mantis goes a step further by identifying teams or players within that category.
That intelligence is then run through Mantis’ contextual and brand safety engine, applying its RED / AMBER / GREEN classification system, that is already trusted across the open web, to produce nuanced suitability ratings and contextual signals based on what a video actually contains.
The platform is built to understand context at scene level, for example, recognising the difference between a knife-crime news report and a cooking video featuring knives, or between low-quality user-generated footage and professionally produced editorial content. This allows publishers to increase sellable inventory while helping advertisers make more informed buying decisions.
“Broadcasters and publishers are sitting on valuable video inventory they cannot safely or accurately sell, while buyers often lack the signals they need to spend confidently,” said Ben Pheloung, General Manager of Mantis. “Mantis Video changes that. It gives both sides clear intelligence based on what content actually contains, helping publishers unlock revenue from inventory that would otherwise be overlooked.”
Once processed, publishers and broadcasters can use Mantis Video data to contextualise ad placements at source, surface relevant archive clips alongside editorial content, and filter inventory through Mantis signals to ensure placements are both relevant and brand safe.
To maximise the amount of suitable inventory available, the platform also includes a hybrid semantic search API, which combines keyword retrieval with embedding-based semantic understanding, enabling relevant video content to be surfaced even when exact search terms were not initially present.
Mantis Video is available in three tiers: Metadata Only, Brand Safety & Context, and Search & Recommender.
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