Meta partners with brand suitability provider Zefr to enable advertisers to ensure that their promotions don’t appear alongside potentially offensive material on the Facebook Feed. It will provide more options for brands to manage their ad placements across their apps.
Meta stated in their blog that after an extensive vetting process, they collaborated with Zefr together to develop a solution to measure and verify the suitability of adjacent content to ads in Feed, with the goal of starting with small-scale testing in the third quarter of this year and moving to limited availability in the fourth quarter. Rich Raddon, co-founder and co-CEO of Zefr said in a statement,
“The future of the ad industry is moving towards transparent and accurate measurement for brand safety and suitability in complex environments, based on the GARM [Global Alliance for Responsible Media] standards. Zefr is thrilled to partner with Meta to develop the first suitability measurement product for Feed, giving advertisers deeper transparency into their content adjacencies across Meta.”
Additionally, Zefr has also collaborated with TikTok and YouTube on similar initiatives, leveraging advanced AI systems along with human reviews to provide customized brand safety solutions and more control to ad partners.
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The main aim is to give Meta advertisers a better understanding of the types of content that appear adjacent to their ads, helping them make informed decisions to reach their marketing goals. As the integration with Zefr reaches limited availability, Meta will work toward having the brand suitability integration opportunity open to all badged partners.
The move is part of Meta’s answer to longstanding demands from the advertising industry, which has advocated for brands to be given greater control over where their ads appear online. Advertisers have demanded tools to help them customize and prevent ads from appearing adjacent to content the brand deems unsuitable, such as politics or news about death or violence.
Meta has also been working closely with GARM as it develops these controls, which will be aligned with the GARM Suitability Framework. Rob Rakowitz, GARM Initiative Lead, World Federation of Advertisers welcomed the partnership saying it will provide the advertisers the much-needed post-campaign transparency which is difficult to measure sometime.
“In our quest to eliminate harmful content from ad-supported digital media, we need controls on where ads appear and measurement to verify the accuracy of those placements.”
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The social media giant has started to build controls for the Facebook and Instagram feeds primarily for English-speaking markets first. Next year, the company plans to expand the placement coverage to include other languages, Stories, Reels, Video Feeds, Instagram Explore, and other surfaces across Facebook and Instagram. Meta vice president, client council, and industry trade relations Samantha Stetson said,
“Providing advertisers control over the content their ads appear next to is incredibly important work for us, and to our commitment to the industry via GARM. We’re excited with the progress we are making toward building content- based controls for Feed and are excited to start development with Zefr on third-party Feed verification. It will take time, but it’s the right work to do.”
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