Stop Paying for Waste, Start Paying for Quality

Agentic Solutions is a new series from Scope3 that explores how brand agents are solving advertising’s toughest challenges. Each installment looks at a specific buyer or seller pain point and how capabilities within Scope3’s Agentic Advertising Platform turn those challenges into opportunities for smarter, more sustainable performance.

Marketers are under growing pressure to do more with less: cut inefficiencies, reduce carbon waste, and somehow still drive measurable growth. At the same time, a significant share of today’s media budgets still flows into environments that fail to deliver quality, sustainability, or attention. Made-for-advertising (MFA) sites, invalid traffic, and high-emission supply paths quietly drain resources and distort performance reporting, wasting money and energy that could otherwise support meaningful audience engagement.

Brand Standards and Media Quality, two key capabilities within your Scope3 brand agent, can help stop this cycle. Brand Standards ensures suitability by applying your brand’s specific guidance to every impression, while Media Quality filters out MFA sites and invalid traffic automatically. Together, these features reduce wasted ad spend while improving sustainability and ROI across programmatic campaigns.

The problem with low-quality inventory

The programmatic system was built for scale; however, over time, that scale has come to favor quantity over quality. Vast amounts of digital inventory are traded automatically every second, much of it delivering little to no value.

For example:

• MFA and IVT activity inflate metrics while delivering minimal attention.
• High-emission supply paths increase cost and carbon pollution.
• Poor viewability and irrelevant placements reduce campaign effectiveness.

Each wasted impression wastes budget and carbon while rewarding low-quality supply. How can marketers ensure that their brand agents recognize quality and invest in it instead?

The agentic solutions: Brand Standards and Media Quality

Brand Standards: defining suitability for your brand

Brand Standards allows your brand agent to understand what unsuitable means for your business. Through prompting, you can teach your agent to identify and avoid sensitive or off-brand topics, such as war or financial crisis, all while maintaining safe, suitable reach.

Every brand agent also includes a layer of Common Sense Brand Safety that automatically blocks illegal content such as explicit violence, terrorism, pornography, and CSAM (child sexual abuse material). These protections are always active, creating a baseline of safety without limiting your ability to make more nuanced decisions.

Beyond this foundation, Scope3's Brand Standards capability puts full control of brand suitability into your hands, replacing static blocklists with dynamic, contextual intelligence that adapts to your specific standards.

With Brand Standards, you can:

• Define clear guidance around topics and environments your brand should avoid.
• Ensure suitability is applied consistently across every impression.
• Refine prompts to continuously improve your brand agent’s judgment over time.

Media Quality: elevating quality control

Media Quality extends your brand agent’s decisioning power beyond suitability by evaluating every impression across quality criteria, from viewability score to carbon emissions. This helps your agent prioritize inventory that performs better for people, the planet, and your business, all to your exact threshold specifications.

With Media Quality, you can:

• Set thresholds for viewability score and attention potential based on screen size, exposure time, and placement quality.
• Avoid problematic placements with excessive refresh rates, low content value, or high invalid traffic.
• Filter low-quality inventory (including MFAs and indirect supply paths) to improve performance efficiency.
• Reduce emissions by setting sustainability thresholds for carbon impact.
• Balance ads-to-content ratios to improve overall media experience.

Together, Brand Standards and Media Quality create a smarter foundation for quality control. They ensure your brand agent can apply human-like discernment to every impression by aligning suitability, sustainability, and performance within a single, transparent system.

The impact: Better outcomes, smaller footprint

Brand Standards and Media Quality enable your brand agent to deliver more effective campaigns while strengthening accountability across the entire supply chain.

• Buyers reduce wasted spend while improving ROI and sustainability performance.
• Sellers benefit from increased investment in quality inventory that meets higher standards for viewability and transparency.
• Everyone gains from a healthier media ecosystem where each impression contributes to business and environmental objectives.

Ready to reduce wasted ad spend and improve campaign quality? Log in today to configure Brand Standards and Media Quality in your brand agent and start filtering out low-quality, unsuitable inventory automatically.

You can also reach out to the Scope3 team for help designing, refining, and launching your first agent.

Start building your brand agent