Brand Safety, Monetization

New MAX Brand Safety Features to Protect Your Brand

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Idil Canal
Dec 28, 2021

The MAX+MoPub unified platform delivers new ad formats and a suite of powerful features to prevent risky and inappropriate ads from showing in your apps and keep your brand safe. Here are some new ad formats supported by MAX and powerful brand safety tools for both buyers and publishers that will be supported starting with the initial MAX SDK release in the first week of January 2022, and released thereafter on a rolling basis.

Brand Safety For Buyers

  • Open Measurement SDK Support for Viewability — We are integrating with the IAB’s Open Measurement SDK for passing enhanced viewability signals in the bid stream, allowing third parties to view and verify measurement for ads served to mobile app environments. 
  • Sellers.json — Sellers.json is an IAB-provided standard that allows buyers to discover and verify either direct sellers or mediators for digital advertising opportunities. This includes verifying publisher identities, including the name, domain name, and seller ID.
  • App-ads.txt Adoption — Another IAB initiative, Authorized Sellers for Apps, or app-ads.txt, helps prevent losing revenue to fraud. It blocks unauthorized publishers impersonating legitimate apps and misleading brands into spending budget on fake inventory. Once created, the app-ads.txt file gives you more control over who is allowed to sell ads on your app and it helps you ensure your app’s ad inventory is only sold through channels that you authorize. We are actively working with publishers to enforce the adoption of app-ads.txt. 
  • MRC-Accredited Fraud Protection Partnerships — This feature helps protect against fraud and keep analytics accurate. The Media Rating Council (MRC) manages accreditation for media research and rating purposes and helps ensure that accredited partners’ ad serving technologies comply with industry standards for click measurement, video impressions, viewability measurements, and more. Future partnerships will be announced within the quarter.

Supported Ad Formats

The integration of MAX and MoPub ensures that all ad formats are supported, including two new formats (advanced native and rewarded interstitials).

  • Ad Formats Supported — Banners, interstitials, MREC, native and rewarded video. 
  • Advanced Native Ad Format Support (beta) — Native ads let you monetize your app in a way that’s consistent with the app’s design, and MAX mediation now supports the native ad format as a beta feature. This initial beta version supports common templatized use cases and provides access to our full suite of SDK-based network partners in addition to AppLovin Exchange DSPs. Native Advanced format support and native public launch will be live with the January SDK release. It will let you access an ad’s individual assets so you can design the ad layout to be consistent with the look and feel of your app. In addition, the SDK will automatically handle image caching and metrics tracking, enabling you to focus on how, when, and where to display ads to support more advanced use cases. Read more about the Native Ad format.

    Note: The next iteration of the native product will be available in the first SDK release in the first week of January 2022, and it will be compatible with the advanced implementations supported by MoPub. After the early January SDK release, our documentation page will have detailed instructions on different developer use cases, and the AppLovin support team will provide guidance for its integration.
  • Rewarded Interstitials (beta) — This feature will be new to MoPub users. The full-screen ad format allows you to offer rewards without requiring the user to opt-in. This early version includes demand from AppLovin, Facebook, and AdMob. More SDK networks and AppLovin Exchange support will be added in Q1 2022. 

Brand Safety For Publishers with Ad Review

These brand-safety features will be new for MoPub users migrating to MAX.

  • Support for Fullscreen and Banner Ads — Protect against bad ads in your app. MAX’s Ad Review feature automatically detects the ad content running in your apps and allows you to catch content that you’ve defined as risky or malicious. Learn how to set up Ad Review or read more technical details about Ad Review in our MAX documentation.
  • User Journey (beta) — Track down problematic ads reported by users. Slated to launch in early Q1 2022, this feature is available to beta MAX publishers. User Journey gives you insight into the ads seen by your app users and their overall ad journey. It enables you to track down the source of problematic ads reported by users through support tickets and then email that partner directly from the same dashboard.  Reach out to your AppLovin account team and read more about Ad Reporting in the MAX documentation.
  • Universal Creative Reporting — This feature enables you to identify problematic creatives to your network partners and attach information to reports to help your partners identify and address the problematic creatives. Tip: From the MAX dashboard, select Ad Review > Review > Creatives, choose the ad creative(s) that you want to report, and then click the send button.  Learn more about reporting in the MAX documentation.
  • Creative Debugger — The Creative Debugger provides detailed information about creatives, such as the name of the ad network, creative ID, and more. If you find a problematic creative in your tests or if you want your users to report ads using a custom gesture, you can immediately report the creative to the network using the creative debugger feature. Read more about the Creative Debugger in the MAX documentation.
  • Competitor Monitoring & Risky Content Detection  — Ad Review’s Competitor Monitoring helps you stay ahead of the competition by allowing you to catch and monitor which competitors are running ads across your apps from the MAX dashboard. You can also add, customize, or pause the filtering rules that detect such ads. Read more about Competitor Monitoring in the MAX documentation.

Start your migration to MAX now, and visit our features chart which demonstrates the unparalleled power of this unified MoPub + MAX  platform. AppLovin and MoPub teams are standing to make this as seamless a transition as possible. Please contact us with any questions.

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