Targeting Quality Video Inventory with AI

The Challenge

YouTube is now one of the largest screens in the home, but for advertisers it has always been difficult to know exactly where their money is going. The platform's scale — tens of millions of active channels and billions of videos — makes it almost impossible to manually assess which content is genuinely premium and which is simply popular. SeeViews had just launched with a bold idea: bring TV-grade quality and contextual standards to YouTube advertising. To deliver on that promise, they needed an AI engine capable of understanding video content at an industrial scale, and they needed a partner who could build it with them from day one.

Our Approach

hiai worked alongside the SeeViews team from the earliest days of the business, helping them design and build the core AI platform that powers their proposition. The system ingests and analyses millions of YouTube channels every month, using a combination of machine learning models and content understanding techniques to evaluate production quality, tone, subject matter and brand suitability. Each channel is continuously classified and scored, giving SeeViews a living map of the YouTube landscape that updates as new content is published.

On top of this foundation we built the tools that turn raw analysis into a commercial product — allowing SeeViews to package high-quality, contextually relevant inventory for advertisers and match brands to content that genuinely reflects their audience and values. The result is a platform that behaves less like a media-buying tool and more like a quality control layer for YouTube advertising.

The Outcome

The platform has enabled SeeViews to offer a genuinely unique service to YouTube advertisers: the ability to appear alongside TV-quality content, in the right context, in front of the right audience. By combining scale with precision, SeeViews can give brands the confidence that every impression is bought against content that has been assessed for quality and relevance — something that hasn't previously been available at this depth on YouTube.

The work has been recognised beyond SeeViews' own client base. Barb — the UK's official TV audience measurement body — has praised the approach, and the wider industry has taken notice of what's possible when AI is applied to video quality at this scale. For hiai, it remains one of our proudest partnerships: a product built from the ground up with a client, that is now helping to redefine what "quality" means in digital video advertising.