Hey, welcome back. You're in the C-Space Studio sponsored by Integral Ad Science. I'm your host James Koteki here at CES 2025. We are talking to luminaries and thought leaders in the areas of marketing, media, branding, and advertising. And joining us now is the CEO of our sponsor, Integral Ad Science, Lisa Utz Schneider. Thank you for coming back to the C-Space Studio. And joining you is Jen Wong, the COO of Reddit. Thank you so much for coming for the first time to the C-Space Studio. Welcome to you both.
Thanks James, thanks for having us.
Jen, tell me about how Reddit and IAS partner together, how you got together.
Yeah, well actually Lisa and I have known each other for a long time. But IAS is obviously one of the leaders that customers really value in terms of looking, you know, working with other partners. And we announced today our partnership in brand safety. So Reddit is greater than 99% brand safe based on findings from IAS. We did an integration, and we also actually announced earlier last year a pre-bid solution around using IAS's brand safety rubric. So our customers really value the thought leadership of IAS here, and so we're happy to bring that third-party capability to Reddit.
And Lisa, tell me about what that brand safety looks like on Reddit, because if someone is just kind of just coming into this conversation saying, well, Reddit, well, anyone can just say anything on that platform, right? So then how do you look at how to actually make that a brand safe environment?
Yeah, so Reddit is such an important strategic platform for IAS, and we're thrilled that we continue to strengthen our partnership together with Reddit. As Jen mentioned, today we announced launching brand safety and suitability on Reddit. And the way to think about that is, when you look at a platform like Reddit with its explosive growth and an important revenue stream is advertising revenue, advertisers when they're running ads on Reddit they want to rest assured that where their ads are running it's adjacent to content that is brand safe and brand suitable. And so we've launched our technology and we're doing just that and growing with Reddit and also with their advertiser base.
And Jen, are these ads that are — I'm a Reddit user as I'm sure many people watching are — are these the ads that are kind of in the thread itself that kind of look like Reddit posts and it says that they're sponsored posts?
They're both. They're both in the feed as well as in the conversation, which is in the comments, which is obviously the most valuable part of Reddit. The best of Reddit — the real answers are in the comments. It is. That's where the gold is.
Yeah. And so is part of that too then based on Reddit's ability to kind of show — because people are upvoting and downvoting things on Reddit obviously. So I imagine part of this equation is that if something is, you know, getting a ton of downvotes, that might be a signal that maybe that's not the most brand safe place to be?
Potentially not necessarily. I mean, so just for context, we do our own first-party adjacency checks, etc. So that's obviously really important for how we serve our ads and think about brand safety. And then obviously customers can work with IAS to have their third-party technology as well as an option. You know, posts can be upvoted, they can be downvoted — that doesn't necessarily mean that it's brand unsafe or brand suitable. It's really about giving the advertisers choice and controls over what's important to them, and that's very different per advertiser, what is sensitive to them. And so that's what it allows them to do. It's less about the voting and more about the context that they want to be in.
Interesting. Lisa, congratulations on this announcement with Reddit. What are the overall trends that you're looking at as we head here into 2025? What are some things that you want to tell the industry that they should be focused on?
Yeah, in addition to announcing our partnership continuation with Reddit by launching brand safety and suitability, we also announced today that we launched Total Media Performance. And the way to think about that, it's an evolution of IAS's solutions. The company, we've been around for 15 years, we're a leader in global measurement and optimization offering solutions like viewability, invalid traffic detection, brand safety and suitability, ensuring for brands and publishers that they are operating in a transparent environment. We are helping brands drive greater efficiency. We're now evolving it into performance, and that is a big theme you'll be hearing from IAS this year, is helping brands and platforms and publishers drive greater performance, greater efficiency, while they're also ensuring that the environment for the brands is brand safe and brand suitable.
