• by Tobi Elkin  @tobielkin, March 30, 2016

Integral Ad Science is trying to help advertisers lessen the risk of placing ads on non-brand-safe apps. On Wednesday, Integral announced a pre-bid targeting segment for mobile in-app brand safety.

Advertisers can now use mobile in-app brand safety targeting on AppNexus, the first Integral partner to integrate the function on programmatic buying technology. The mobile segments offer proactive solutions to target away from apps with adult content, or those focused on alcohol, illegal downloads, drugs, gambling, offensive language, or violence.

Since apps cannot be crawled like websites, Integral’s data science team has built new methods to rank apps and assign them to its industry standard brand-safety content categories.

“As consumers spend more time on mobile, advertisers are spending more dollars there, and they need the same brand-safety protection they have needed on desktop,” Dave Marquard, VP of product management, Integral Ad Science, told Real-Time Daily via email.

Marquard said that while the two app store (Apple’s and Google’s) guidelines do effectively keep “the worst of the worst apps out” (you can’t have a hate group or pornography app on either stores), a huge brand safety gap remains for advertisers that don’t want to be on apps that are violent or carry offensive content.

“Prior to this solution, buying in-app advertising was a complete guessing game, and there was no way to optimize for media quality programmatically,” Marquard said, referring to the process as “throwing darts at a wall.”

“We all have the few dozen apps we use all the time, but there's a long tail of thousands of previously unmonitored apps. This is a major step forward for making the mobile advertising environment less of a ‘Wild West,'” he said.