Revolutionizing Brand Safety With Pre-Bid Verification: Taboola and IAS Announce Partnership

Taboola launches new pre-bid brand safety solution in partnership with IAS

Taboola yesterday launched a pre-bid brand safety solution for advertisers in partnership with digital ad verification provider, Integral Ad Science (IAS). The partnership will allow advertisers to directly apply pre-bid brand safety within a native discovery platform. It will also help customers tap into Taboola’s large audience base of 1.4 billion people each month.

“As the advertising world evolves there is one constant – brands need to be able to spend with confidence,” said Adam Singolda, founder and CEO at Taboola. “Now Taboola’s large number of global advertisers can feel secure knowing that their content will only appear in locations that have been deemed appropriate by IAS technology. IAS has proven to be a brand safety innovator and a key strategic partner for Taboola. By extending our partnership and introducing this first-to-market offering, we’re giving advertisers yet another way to benefit from Taboola’s audience scale and ultimately ensure ROI.”

Also read: Twitter Security Breach: Time to Rethink Our Approach to Brand Safety

Taboola and IAS have been collaborating over the past few years to optimize the advertising experience for brands. However, the new product will bring the power of IAS’ proprietary ad verification technology to Taboola Ads Console. This gives advertisers the control to opt-in to pre-bid brand safety targeting on any campaign.

“Performance advertisers don’t have to sacrifice brand safety to obtain the scale they’re looking for,” said Craig Ziegler, VP product management, IAS. “We’re giving advertisers an intuitive way to ensure their ad placements are brand safe directly within Taboola’s technology as they begin a campaign.”

In a press releaseOpens a new window , Taboola has indicated that early adopters of the pre-bid integration have seen great success.  Winterbridge Media, a long-standing partner of both Taboola and IAS, noted that they have seen high performance with brand-suitable adjacencies.

Also read: Adtech Tries to Solve A Major Problem: Brand Safety

Pre-Bid Brand Safety: What’s in it For Marketers?

IAS scores web pages across a range of suitability parameters and blocks brand ads from unsafe pages based on brand’s own risk threshold. So, while advertisers/brands have a simple route to ensuring brand safety – purchasing ad inventory from premium publishers, the trade-off is scale. They restrict exposure through selective buying. However, with Taboola’s latest integration with IAS, marketers and advertisers can now leverage programmatic native advertising while ensuring brand safety.

While Taboola hasn’t shed light on how it will vet brand-safety, IAS’ recently launched Context ControlOpens a new window is expected to provide page-level analysis through machine learning and semantic technology.

Also read: The Brand Safety Conundrum and What To Do About It

The focus on brand suitability and contextual targeting is only set to increase as content consumption rises. According to an IAS survey,   63% of U.S. consumers hold a brand accountable for the content that they advertise alongside. In other words, consumers expect brands to advertise in relevant, appropriate environments. Verification partners like IAS provide solutions to assist brands in controlling the places in which their message appears. According to an independent evaluation by Ozone, IAS’s patented semantic technology is proven to be 42% more accurate than the next industry offering. With sentiment analysis and emotional classification technology, only IAS can detect the author’s true intent.

To that end, Taboola’s integration with IAS signifies a new way for advertisers to reach their audiences in brand-safe environments without having to compromise on scale.