IAS Moves Beyond Verification With New AI Agent for Ad Campaign Optimizations

The ad verification and measurement firm Integral Ad Science (IAS) is adding an AI agent to its platform to help advertisers optimize campaigns, the company announced Tuesday. IAS primarily offers tools for helping advertisers ensure their messages run in appropriate environments and are viewed by real people rather than bots. The company's IAS Agent will use real-time performance insights to tailor and automate campaigns within IAS' platform. Like other AI agents, the new tool will be able to execute some actions autonomously on a user’s behalf. IAS Agent is trained on the company’s years of proprietary data, and uses a multimodal model that can analyze trillions of data signals in real time, including images, audio, video, and text, the company said. With this info, it can automatically recommend—and in some cases directly apply—brand safety settings, context controls, and various optimizations. The tech can cut down significantly on time and resources required for campaign optimization, according to IAS. “We are building this so that brands have higher ROI, they have higher outcomes,” Srishti Gupta, the company’s chief product officer, told ADWEEK. “It's a very critical part of making decision-making faster. We are finding that it's uncovering insights that brands did not have access to before, and opening up that opportunity so they can reinvest those dollars.” While in some cases the tool might simply surface information—identifying trends, anomalies, or underperforming partners across a customer’s IAS dashboard, for instance—in other cases it can take action autonomously. A marketer might, say, upload a campaign brief or set of brand guardrails. With this info, IAS Agent can generate a set of recommendations for tweaking brand safety and suitability settings that, with the user’s permission, will be automatically implemented. (Users can also customize or override these recommendations.) It can help a marketer identify and prioritize or exclude specific content types or media environments, and can automatically update pre-bid context control settings within integrated DSPs, the company said. When recommending a change, the system explains its rationale, showing the user specific signals, historical data, and patterns that led to the suggestion. IAS Agent is also continuously learning from user feedback—it takes note if a marketer consistently overrides certain kinds of recommendations, for example, so as to make fewer of such recommendations in the future. Users can also chat with IAS Agent in natural language for advice on campaign setup. The bot, built on Databricks infrastructure, is interoperable with other agentic systems, enabling marketers to plug in other autonomous media tools and streamline a greater portion of their workflows. French advertising giant Publicis has been an early tester of the program. Publicis Media’s executive vice president of the technology and activation group, Jeff Omoregie, said in a statement that he believes IAS Agent will help improve the efficiency of both brand safety and performance. “The ability to instantly surface transparent, data-driven recommendations in real time will help reduce ad waste and drive stronger performance outcomes for our clients and their campaigns,” he said. Initial tests have shown encouraging results, according to IAS. The company claims that IAS Agent can optimize campaigns 50% faster than manual adjustments, and that the program’s recommendations are often accepted by users. IAS is the latest in a smattering of adtech companies to debut agentic features this year. Last month, Google rolled out Gemini-powered agents for advertising and campaign analytics, while Amazon announced the arrival of its ads agent for automating campaign adjustments. Yahoo DSP is also in the early stages of rolling out a variety of agents designed to aid media buyers, as ADWEEK first reported. Earlier this year, Scope3, which began as a sustainability-focused adtech firm, debuted its own AI agents for brand safety in a fresh challenge to category incumbents IAS and DoubleVerify. IAS will showcase the agent live at CES in Las Vegas in early January, and plans to roll out the tool, free of charge, for all of its global customers early next year. The firm, which made its Nasdaq debut in 2021, is in the process of privatization. It announced in September that it is being acquired by private equity firm Novacap in a $1.9 billion deal. Asked if IAS Agent is key to Novacap’s investment thesis and plans for the business, IAS declined to comment.

Artificial Intelligence

IAS Moves Beyond Verification With New AI Agent for Ad Campaign Optimizations

The tool analyzes live campaign data and can automatically apply brand safety and context controls inside marketers' preferred DSPs

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Kendra Barnett

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