In a major publishing innovation, News UK launches Nucleus Narr(ai)te, unlocking the best of premium publisher content for greater ad effectiveness and efficiency.

News UK - publisher of major media brands including The Sun, The Times, The Sunday Times and talkSPORT - is delighted to announce a pioneering partnership with Illuma, the leading contextual-AI platform, to introduce a new tool: Nucleus Narr(ai)te.

For years news brands have found themselves unfairly penalised through miscategorisation from tagging vendors that failed to understand the nuance of written content correctly. To combat this, News UK has undertaken a new collaboration with Illuma, marking a significant advancement in contextual tagging and brand safety. By utilising Illuma’s AI technology enhanced by human intelligence, across News UK’s world-class journalism, Narr(ai)te aims to deliver unparalleled accuracy and efficiency for advertisers.

The creation of the Nucleus Narr(ai)te tool sees News UK become the first publisher to put this innovative and industry-certified methodology into practice. This enables advertisers to tap into News UK’s highly engaged content across all brands like never before. 

Charlie Celino, Head of Strategic Development, News UK, said: “This latest extension to the Nucleus suite of products uses cutting-edge AI to answer a core problem for publishers - how to accurately and efficiently tag content for advertisers at scale.  Working with Illuma we can now offer agencies and brands more precisely categorised tagging, enabling more effective contextual targeting and greater brand safety. 

“What’s important for us as a publisher is that the more nuanced understanding that Narr(ai)te offers means that we can open up large areas of content that might traditionally been wrongly labelled as brand unsafe. This enables advertisers to access more highly-engaged audiences via our trusted, quality journalism. Narr(ai)te is a significant development for the industry and wouldn’t have been possible without the hard work, determination and cross collaboration between teams at both News UK and Illuma.”

Peter Mason, CEO and Co-Founder, Illuma: “Our collaboration with News UK demonstrates that superior publisher-led standards of contextual accuracy significantly enhance audience relevance for ad campaigns, improving the user experience. This highly nuanced categorisation also opens up more premium, brand-safe inventory, creating scale and opportunity for advertisers and facilitating the flow of revenues into quality journalism.”

News UK played an integral role in training Illuma’s AI model, allowing it to understand the nuances in the brand’s tone of voice and content types creating publisher-specific classifications.This technological stepchange presents an opportunity for News UK to influence the way tagging is placed on content by NLPs (Natural Language Processors) at scale, allowing News UK’s newsbrands a dual methodology whereby tagging is qualified by AI and validated by humans. 

Richard Reeves, Managing Director of AOP, said: “This partnership between News UK and Illuma is a brilliant example of collaborative action being the most powerful tool for tackling industry challenges. Brand safety is an ongoing issue, one with complex nuances, but this market solution demonstrates an enhanced approach to contextual tagging practices; a way to truly understand content – benefiting all parties and driving a healthy digital media ecosystem. At AOP, we’re always looking for new and better ways to move the industry forward and are pleased to champion initiatives like this.”

Early validation testing has shown a subsequent +10% average increase in segment accuracy with notable improvements observed in verticals such as

These core improvements present an opportunity for advertisers to capitalise on highly relevant content where as yet undiscovered audiences are actively engaging.

Proof of concept testing has shown an average +16% increase in brand safe inventory available across the News UK portfolio.

As trusted publishers, it’s natural that a small amount of News UK’s content that contains vital news can sometimes be considered as non-brand safe, however the protection of advertisers within this type of content remains a priority. Narr(ai)te allows for the fair categorisation via the retraining of tagging methods utilised, allowing for a nuanced understanding of the content. 

This product has fundamentally increased the number of brand safety categories News UK offers by over 37% and with this comes the ability to understand fine distinctions between brand safety tagging, rather than bundling topics into elementary and non-relevant categories. An example of this detailed approach to categorisation allows Narr(ai)te to separate content it considers to be about ‘Sensitive Social Issues’ rather than unfairly bundling this content into the ‘Hate Speech’ category. Although content of this type remains infrequent, as a trusted source of information, it is a premium publisher’s duty to report on news of this type.

For advertisers this means content that was previously and unfairly considered unsafe can be tapped into as some of the most engaging relevant content made available from a publisher. For example Narr(ai)te ensures boxing content in which the words ‘hit’ and ‘punch’ are present will no longer be tagged irrelevantly as ‘Death & Injury’, thus making the highly engaged audiences in these spaces available for targeting in a brand safe way.

With enhanced tagging accuracy, Nucleus Narr(ai)te mitigates unfair ad blocking, unlocking more of News UK’s premium content for advertising. This means advertisers can reach highly engaged audiences with greater precision, maximising campaign impact.

Advertisers can be confident that their ads will appear in safe, suitable contexts thanks to the human-trained AI algorithm, which works to analyse content at the deepest level, ensuring a secure environment for brand messaging.

This collaboration has allowed for the creation of a product that is deeply integrated with News UK’s editorial vision and audience engagement strategies, serving to bring to market the very best a publisher has to offer.

For more information about Nucleus and to explore how it can benefit your advertising strategy, please visit new.co.uk/nucleus

ENDS

About News UK

One of the leading media businesses in the UK and Ireland, our newsbrands include The Times, The Sunday Times, The Sun, The Sun on Sunday and The TLS. Our national broadcast brands include talkSPORT, Talk, Piers Morgan Uncensored, Times Radio and Virgin Radio UK, and we have market-leading local radio stations across Ireland. Our world-famous brands provide news, analysis, opinion and entertainment to almost 40 million people each month. Spanning digital and print, audio and video, events and experiences, our brands are home to a plurality of opinion, representing the diverse communities we serve. News UK is wholly owned by News Corp. News Corp (Nasdaq: NWS, NWSA; ASX: NWS, NWSLV)

About Illuma

Illuma is a British AI company, pioneering contextual solutions for enterprise since 2014. Its real-time scaling technology is used by brands and agencies to boost the results of digital ad campaigns. Meanwhile, broadcasters, publishers and online platforms use Illuma to organise, classify and categorise their inventory for commercial activation. 

Illuma is committed to sustaining the open web ecosystem through equitable collaborations between ad tech providers and media owners. The company is proudly building industry-first agreements that recognise media owners’ or sell-side intellectual property rights, and in turn, deliver better outcomes for brands and audiences. 

Illuma was founded by publishing experts and computer scientists from Imperial College, UCL and Cambridge University. The company is based in London with additional offices in New York.

For media enquiries, please contact: nucleusplatform@news.co.uk or visit https://www.news.co.uk/nucleus/