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Share on XIntegral Ad Science’s technology gives advertisers the trust and transparency needed to measure and optimize advertising campaigns across a wide-variety of media channels including the open web, social, CTV, gaming, and more. Our technology provides actionable data for marketers as they seek to maximize media ROI while safeguarding and scaling their brands across the digital ecosystem.
At IAS, we are driven by a singular mission: to be the global benchmark for trust and transparency in digital media quality. But we don’t do this alone: we work with widely-adopted industry bodies, standards, and common frameworks to inform our efforts, giving advertisers a holistic and independent view of how their campaigns are performing.
Our Work with Social Platforms
IAS has a long history of deep co-innovations with the largest social platforms. Our measurement solutions are currently available across these leading platforms, encompassing our Viewability & Invalid Traffic measurement and Brand Safety and Suitability products. Every social platform is unique, and IAS’s products are built to align with the bespoke nature and operating practices of each platform with which we partner. In addition, our Brand Safety and Suitability products align to industry standards defined by Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) and other industry bodies.
Our flagship measurement product, Total Media Quality (TMQ), provides next-generation Viewability, Invalid Traffic, and Brand Safety & Suitability insights for advertisers. Marketers now have the ability to monitor the quality of their media buys on social media and ensure their ads are appearing next to content that is brand safe and suitable. Our Brand Safety and Suitability capability is powered by advanced machine-learning applied to image, audio, and text signals, and at the frame-by-frame level for video.*
Importantly, as an unbiased, independent third-party provider, IAS does not in any way control the content on any social media platform, or advise on marketers’ plans to advertise on social media platforms.
Frequently Asked Questions:
What is Brand Safety?
Brand safety refers to actions taken to protect brands from content that’s generally recognized as unsafe. For example, topics like hate speech and terrorism tend to present brand equity risk to most advertisers.
Brand safety is for every brand and reflects the need to avoid serving ads adjacent to unsafe content – content that’s generally recognized as unsafe for any brand.
How is this different from Brand Suitability?
In addition to protecting brands from appearing near unsafe content, brand suitability provides more granular control of content adjacencies. Brand suitability takes the next step by aligning with content that’s an ideal fit for a brand’s values or campaign goals. Advertisers set their own suitability thresholds and profiles. For example, a brand focused on family may not want to appear next to content that is focused on alcohol drinking, whereas this may be a suitable placement for an alcohol brand.
Aligned to the GARM Framework, Brand Suitability is measured as content that is scored as ‘Low’, ‘Medium’, or ‘High’ across the supported 12 GARM content categories.
At IAS, we offer customized options – such as measurement aligned with a marketers’ specific Brand Safety and Suitability preferences and in many cases, optimization controls – so that advertisers can tailor their approach to each brand, while maintaining scale and promoting performance.
What is a Brand Safety Rating?
A brand safety rating refers to the percentage of ads passed for the GARM brand safety floor, out of all ads served. According to GARM, it represents “content not appropriate for any advertising support.”
IAS reports on Brand Safety in alignment with the GARM Framework. Content that is not brand safe, or unsafe, is scored the ‘Floor’ risk level. For example, an advertiser’s Brand Safety Rate represents the percentage of their advertisements that ran next to brand safe content (content not classified as the Floor).
How are Brand Safety ratings determined?
We provide brand safety ratings within our IAS Signal dashboard across each of our social media partners, in addition to CTV, Open Web, and Emerging Mediums. The ratings indicate the percentage of measured ad impressions [that] appeared adjacent to content that was deemed safe in accordance with a widely-adopted industry standard: the GARM brand safety floor criteria.
For example, if a marketer is seeing a 99% brand safety rating, that means their ads did not appear next to GARM floor content, as measured by IAS, except for 1% of the time.
How are Brand Suitability ratings determined?
Our Context Control product enables advertisers and agencies to define specific guidelines for brand suitability on the open web and is a viable alternative to keyword lists for content avoidance. This solution is powered by a proprietary cognitive semantic technology which leverages Natural Language Processing (NLP) to extract page semantic, context, emotion, and sentiment.
Within the IAS Signal dashboard, we provide advertisers options to customize their brand suitability settings. These settings then define their Brand Suitability rates – content scored as low, medium, and high risk – aligned to the GARM framework.
What is measured on social media?
IAS measures advertiser campaigns at the impression-level on social media platforms where our third-party measurement is available. For Brand Safety and Suitability, we apply our tech to content that are aligned with social media platforms’ privacy guidelines and adjacent to where advertisers’ ads are appearing.
What else do marketers see?
Via our integrations with social platforms, we use our models trained against the GARM Framework to independently score content directly adjacent to these ads. We provide this transparency back to the advertiser through granular reporting.
Our first priority is and will always be our customers. Our unwavering commitment to customer obsession not only defines us, but also fuels our position as a leader in digital media quality. We will continue to evolve to meet the needs of our customers and partners, and we remain dedicated to harnessing the most innovative technology and insights to deliver solutions that drive superior results.
For more insights on brand safety and suitability, visit our “State of Brand Safety” report here.
*Methodology by platform may vary
