Integral Ad Science (IAS), a leading global media measurement and optimisation platform, today (July 12th, 2023) launched a case study where Mastercard partnered with IAS to identify the value and efficiency opportunities in utilising our pre-bid solution. 

Mastercard, as a leader in the payment processing industry, values speed, performance, and efficiency. Since Mastercard has a new brand safety target benchmark of 98% that is enforced globally, they aimed to achieve higher brand safety performance, bring down fail rates, and ensure the highest media quality standards across their programmatic campaigns quarter after quarter. Also, Mastercard desired to receive real-time signals of their performance to help them efficiently optimise their campaigns before bids are placed on possibly unsuitable environments.

IAS, in partnership with Dentsu and Mastercard, aligned on a custom pre-bid strategy to generate a seamless activation process based on Mastercard’s post-bid settings. Mastercard enabled three IAS pre-bid solutions — brand safety, contextual avoidance, and fraud — across their programmatic campaigns from May 2022 onwards, which helped reduce Mastercard’s brand suitability fail rate, resulting in delivering quality impressions in a safe and suitable environment.

Ultimately, Mastercard witnessed performance uplifts across their KPIs once IAS pre-bid optimisation strategies were put in place. Mastercard can now make confident brand safety decisions across their programmatic media investments, backed by IAS granular insights. 

Below are other key findings from the case study:

• Increased brand safety pass rate: 15% increase post-IAS pre-bid optimisation
• Reduced invalid traffic rate: 82% improvement post-IAS pre-bid optimisation
• Improved cost of quality impression: 72% improvement post-IAS pre-bid opt

Please see the case study attached and it can be downloaded here.