Taboola adopts pre-bid brand safety technology

Taboola, the content discovery and native advertising platform today announced a partnership with Intergal Ad Science (IAS) to deploy its brand safety technology within Taboola’s discovery platform.

Taboola pairs a discovery capabilities, allowing publishers to place relevant content in front of a monthly audience of 1.4 billion users, with a native ad offering which monetizes the audience. IAS, which also offers ad quality and anti-fraud solutions, will deliver pre-bid brand safety controls within the Taboola platform.

Blocking ads from unsafe pages. IAS scores web pages across a range of suitability parameters, and blocks brand ads from unsafe pages based on the brand’s own risk threshhold.

The partnership is described by Taboola as an industry first. We asked them what that means. “IAS works with a variety of publishers, platforms, and advertisers, but to date, IAS pre-bid brand safety solutions are typically found in traditional demand side platforms. This integration is the first of its kind within a closed native advertising platform which operates on a CPC bidding model,” said Dave Struzzi, Taboola’s Corporate Communications Leader.

Taboola already has controls for safety, but the integration of a third party solution is important, he told us, “so that we’re not the ones ‘grading our own homework’ re brand safety.”

Why we care. While many brands handle safety by selectively buying ad inventory from premium publishers, the temptation to reach audiences at scale through programmatic native advertising, where inventory purchase is automated remains great—and fraught with risk. This is an attempt to mitigate that risk.