TikTok Announces New Brand Safety and Suitability Partners

TikTok has announced a new set of official measurement partners, which will provide third-party data on TikTok ads placement and performance, in order to provide more reassurance to ad partners.

As per TikTok:

“Today, the TikTok Marketing Partners Program is proud to announce its first group of badged Measurement Partners with a new specialty in Brand Safety and Suitability: DoubleVerify, Integral Ad Science (IAS) and Zefr. All three partners have built solutions that help to safeguard advertising on TikTok so that marketers can have more confidence that their brand campaigns will run adjacent to brand-suitable content that reflects the industry standards set by the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM).”

TikTok advertisers have been working with these providers to measure their campaigns over the past few years, but now, TikTok is officially endorsing them, and working with each to improve their respective process.

The three measurement providers also work with Meta and YouTube to provide the same assurance, which, as TikTok notes, enables advertisers to ensure that their promotions don’t appear alongside potentially offensive material, as defined by their own concerns on this front.

Which is important, because while TikTok is hugely popular, there have been noted concerns with some content. Dangerous challenges are one consideration in this respect, while a more recent trend, called the Foopah Challenge, saw users exposing themselves briefly in their clips.

Reports have also suggested that TikTok can highlight conspiracy theories and misinformation at times, and these new partnerships will help advertisers avoid any potentially harmful association with such.

In addition to this, TikTok also says that it’s worked with these partners to develop a new system to improve measurement ‘across significant volumes of content’.
“This provides brands with neutral third-party visibility into the type of content surrounding their TikTok advertising. Over the last year, DoubleVerify, IAS, and Zefr have collectively supported hundreds of TikTok advertisers and measured more than 26 billion impressions in over 20 languages.”

It’s a good move from TikTok, which has come under more scrutiny in recent months over both its content, and its connection to the CCP. Indeed, EU officials have now called for Government representatives to remove TikTok from their devices, while UK officials are now also calling for the same.

The company’s ties to China are a separate concern to content issues, but amid this, it makes sense for TikTok to be as open and transparent as it can.