| Good morning Marketer, are you running ads across the Microsoft Audience Network?
If so, this one is for you. Yesterday, Microsoft Advertising announced a new partnership with Integral Ad Science (IAS) to provide brand safety verification for native ads on the Microsoft Audience Network (such as MSN, Outlook.com, and Microsoft Edge). Advertisers can target ads using data from the Microsoft audience graph, which includes LinkedIn professional data. The IAS integration is built in, automatically applied across the network, and advertisers aren’t charged outright for it. Inventory gets evaluated prior to the ad auction, wherein IAS will scan, evaluate and rate pages across the Microsoft Audience Network for risk. Risk will be assigned across IAS’s standard set of content categories: Adult, Alcohol, Gambling, Hate Speech, Illegal Downloads, Illegal Drugs, Offensive Language and Controversial Content, and Violence. When page content is deemed moderate or high risk, it gets excluded from the Audience Network’s inventory. Microsoft hasn’t been shy about emphasizing brand safety, and this move sends a strong signal to advertisers that safety is still a top priority. The tradeoffs will likely be some impact on scale and potentially higher CPMs on those pages deemed low risk. There’s more below, including an update on TikTok’s status in app stores. Taylor Peterson,
Deputy Editor | 