• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, June 25, 2024

Microsoft now gives advertisers independent analysis of brand safety and suitability, viewability and invalid traffic across its advertising platforms through an extended partnership with Integral Ad Science (IAS).

The announcement made Tuesday expands Microsoft Advertising’s collaboration with IAS, a global media measurement and optimization platform, to support all its owned and operated inventory and direct partnerships.

Post-bid third-party brand safety and suitability, viewability, and invalid traffic measurement are available across Microsoft’s advertiser solutions such as Microsoft Advertising, Audience Ads, and Microsoft Invest, an enterprise-level demand-side platform (DSP).

Audience ads supports display, native, and video across Microsoft owned-and-operated sites like MSN, Outlook, Bing, Microsoft 365, and Microsoft Casual Games, as well as trusted third-party publishers like The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Buzzfeed, and others.

Users of Microsoft Invest can access connected television (CTV) publisher ad supplies to reach audiences programmatically.

The two companies say that the expanded collaboration provides deeper insights into how advertisers can drive engagement with verified users and run content adjacent to brand-safe and suitable content through IAS Signal. The partnership also can determine the impact of native, video, display and CTV campaigns across the Microsoft Advertising ecosystem.

Elections worldwide combined with other major events like the Olympics pose a unique set of challenges for advertisers this year. Competition and brand safety concerns create a heightened focus on proving return on investments for campaign. Now, for the first time, advertisers can benefit from verification reporting on Microsoft’s proprietary audience data, including in-market audiences through IAS.

In the recent internal report, The State of Brand Safety, IAS found that 71% of consumers would feel less favorable toward a brand that advertises near inappropriate content. In the same survey, IAS also found 50% of consumers agree they are likely to purchase a product or service from a brand whose ads appear near appropriate content. 

In 2020, Microsoft Advertising announced a partnership with IAS to provide brand-safety verification for the native ads that run on the Microsoft Audience Network, where ad inventory is evaluated prior to the ad auction. IAS scanned, evaluate and rated pages for risk.