POV: Facebook Brand Safety - Improved Publisher Controls

Background:

Facebook has announced numerous new tools to improve brand safety on its platform (in addition to Inventory Filters, announced in April 2019) in a further step towards bringing improved control of where and when advertising appears within placements outside of the social newsfeed - Audience Network and in-stream.

Details and Implications:

Following ever-increasing scrutiny over advertising appearing against problematic content, Facebook’s two-year journey of the development and improvement of available brand safety controls includes a number of changes centered towards maintaining a high-quality ecosystem of content, publishers and ads through higher transparency and sophisticated tools for further control.

Four key improvements found within Facebook’s new brand safety controls include:

• Improved account level control: Moving from manually appiled controls within individual campaigns, advertisers can now apply consistent and multi-campaign block lists, source delivery reports and set inventory filters at the account level (Business Manager or Ads Manager).
  
  
• New brand safety partner: To provide further freedom for advertisers to select relevant and/or existing brand safety providers, Zefr now joins DoubleVerify, Integral Ad Science and OpenSlate as a recognised brand safety partner, enabling greater insight into the success of the applied brand safety controls against advertisers’ needs.
  
  
• Dynamic content sets: To enable increased control over which videos are available for advertisers within the in-stream placement, advertisers working with Integral Ad Science, OpenSlate or Zefr will have access to this alpha test enabling customised video sets through a content-level white listing tool that routinely updates and adjusts targetable videos based on what best suits advertisers’ brand safety tolerances. 
  
  
• From publisher black lists to white lists: In addition to existing black lists controls, this alpha and beta test brings improved ad delivery control, enabling advertisers to define where ads are exclusively shown on content from select publishers within Audience Network and in-stream placements.

Twitter and Snapchat both recently announced that they will fact-check political ads, so Facebook has generated a lot of column inches around its decision not to fact-check political ads or content and news sources that will be featured in the dedicated news section it is testing. However, its new set of brand safety tools are an attempt give advertisers added controls over how, where and in what publisher inventory their ads may appear across in-stream and Instant Articles on Facebook or via the Audience Network. These controls also add to earlier brand safety initiatives and follow Facebook’s latest "transparency report" detailing the recent actions taken to remove illicit posts from Facebook and Instagram.

Summary:

These improvements are a positive brand safety step in enabling advertisers the opportunity to consider expanding advertising tactics into testing non-feed-based placements including Audience Network and in-stream. As part of our global GroupM brand safety recommendations, it’s imperative to firstly consider the potential continued risk associated with these mentioned placements, with adoption of such based on the advertisers’ tolerance between reach and contextual risk.

Further Reading: AdAge | GroupM Brand Safety Guide | Facebook