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Platform-wide brand safety protection, powered by Integral Ad Science

Updated July 16, 2021

A brand image is carefully crafted over the years, and marketers around the world are being more and more careful about protecting their brand image in advertising. In native, display and social advertising, an ad appearing next to inappropriate content can seriously damage consumer’s trust. To help advertisers achieve their advertising goals while implementing the right guardrails to protect their brand, Microsoft Advertising is coming together with Integral Ad Science (IAS), the global leader in digital ad verification, to offer an additional layer of brand safety protection on the Microsoft Audience Network.

Protecting advertiser’s brand equity at no additional cost

At Microsoft Advertising, we know brand safety matters when it comes to creating genuine connections with customers and building lasting relationships. We kept that in mind when building our programmatic native advertising solution. The Microsoft Audience Network is guided by an uncompromising respect for brand safety, built atop our deep experience in combating fraud, and focused on maintaining platform integrity. Our network is comprised of high-quality native placements, curated through human and AI reviews and brand-safe environments on Microsoft owned and operated sites like MSN, Outlook.com and Microsoft Edge, and on select premium partner properties.

Building upon our brand safety foundations, Microsoft Advertising is now integrated with IAS to protect advertiser brand equity and spend from unnecessary risk. Fueled by IAS’s predictive and real-time data, an additional layer of platform-wide protection has been automatically applied across the Microsoft Audience Network to help advertisers uphold their brand safety standards at no additional cost. Through this pre-bid integration, only validated inventory from IAS will be served on our network.

 
I’m thrilled that IAS is the first platform-wide brand safety partner across the Microsoft Audience Network. This means that we can provide the highest level of brand safety coverage for marketers across this inventory.

— Lisa Utzschneider, Chief Executive Officer, IAS

IAS brand safety pre-bid protection layered in our audience network

For all Microsoft Audience Ads campaigns, IAS will automatically scan all pages of all sites that Microsoft Audience Network ads can appear on. They will rate the page based on risk associated across their standard content categories (Adult, Alcohol, Gambling, Hate Speech, Illegal Downloads, Illegal Drugs, Offensive Language and Controversial Content, Violence) and send a signal to our system preventing us from showing any ads on any pages that they deem as moderate or high risk.

IAS rating methodology never relies on single-source data to evaluate content — it weighs competing evidence sources to create the most accurate and comprehensive rating of page content, making it possible for marketers to maintain quality control for native ads.

Any pages that are deemed moderate or high-risk will be excluded from the backend before serving so you don’t need to worry about manually excluding these URLs from your campaigns.

With this new pre-bid integration, advertisers can not only connect with their audiences in certified brand-safe environments, but also engage them at the right time and achieve great performance with our first-party intent signals and industry-leading AI technology.

This partnership is now available in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Australia and New Zealand.

To get started on the Microsoft Audience Network, advertisers can contact their Microsoft Advertising representative. or visit our help page.

Research source cited in this post: Microsoft Advertising and LRW Research: “Uncovering the Trust Drivers,” 2019 (U.S.).