Industry Update
Last month, Facebook announced to extend their brand safety controls in a few key areas in their quest to provide a safe environment for people and advertisers. So what’s changing? Read this blog to find out all you need to know!
Angelina Natividad
Online Marketer at The Next Ad
Dec 24, 2019
It’s a topic you might have already heard or talked about over the last few months: online ads that were being shown on offensive or inappropriate content that could potentially damage the advertiser’s brand when being associated together. Surely any brand’s absolute nightmare.
That’s why, when confronted with this, advertisers took to ad network providers to put more pressure on prioritising brand safety controls.
While Facebook already provides advertisers with the ability to apply blocklists for apps, websites and Pages, the platform had recently announced that they’ll be extending their brand safety controls in a few ways.
It’s needless to say that prevention is better than cure. However, with a platform as big as Facebook, it’s also understandable that it’s hard to assess and prevent inappropriate all things from being published on the platforms at all times. Not to say, of course, that not all efforts should be made to ensure this as much as possible.
Considering this, Facebook stated that they will continue to invest their resources in establishing and implementing more effective Community Standards, to determine ‘what is and what is not’ allowed on the channel. The company currently has over 35,000 people working on safety and security alone. Facebook also affirmed to keep investing in the needed technology to detect and remove content that may violate their policies.
In an effort to provide more useful tools and transparency, Facebook will soon enable advertisers to create publisher whitelists on in-stream ad campaigns. This will allow advertisers to have a number of specific publishers for which ad placements are automatically approved. This is next to the ability to create blocklists, which in contrary, prevents an advertiser’s ad to be displayed on certain publishers.
All in all, improving and expanding the controls that will help contribute to a healthy environment for platform users, advertisers and publishers!
In order to realise the mentioned (and unmentioned) changes Facebook is planning to enforce, Facebook has been partnered up with digital brand safety companies, such as OpenSlate, Double Verify and Integral Ad Science, and will now also be working with Zefr to ensure brand safety controls. For more information on Facebook’s partnership with Zefr, be sure to check out this piece!
So, what do you think of the steps that are being taken by Facebook to enforce brand safety controls? And what’s next – How do you think this challenge should be addressed and tackled? Be sure to let us know in the comments below!
