Meta Provides New Ad Placement Controls to Ensure Brand Safety

As it works to provide more tools to facilitate brand safety in ad placement, Meta has launched a new set of inventory filters for Facebook and Instagram Feeds, which will provide a simple way for brands to avoid unwanted association with potentially offensive, or otherwise undesirable content.

As you can see in this example, Meta will now enable advertisers to choose a setting that relates to their desired placement safety level.

• Expanded inventory – The default Meta ads setting will show ads next to content that both adheres to Meta’s Community Standards, and meets its monetization eligibility criteria. These requirements ensure that ads are not displayed alongside highly offensive or harmful content.  
• Moderate inventory – The next level of restriction will exclude placement alongside content that may be considered risky, in alignment with the GARM Brand Suitability Framework. That could include content which depicts non-violent crime, some coarse language, and mildly suggestive topics
• Limited inventory – This last tier is the most restricted placement option, which will ensure your promotions are not displayed beside any content that is considered either high or medium risk.

In order to ensure these requirements are met, Meta will utilize a range of content classifiers and advanced AI tools, which can now scan content in both text and visual form.

As per Meta:

“We built a multi-stage AI review system to classify content for advertisers to ensure brand suitability controls are in place. This system learns to classify content in Facebook and Instagram Feeds – not only text but also video and images – to determine if it meets our monetization policies; if it does not, the content is not eligible to have ads appear above or below it. When content is found to be eligible for ad adjacency, the models assign it to a suitability category.”

That’ll help to ensure that Meta adheres to your chosen tier, while third-party verification will also provide additional assurance around ad placement in its apps.

Which also relates to another new addition – Meta’s also working with Zefr to build a new, AI-powered process that can report the context in which ads appear on Facebook Feed.

“Zefr’s AI product assesses video, image, text and audio to label Feed content based on the GARM suitability standards. The solution allows advertisers to measure, verify and understand the suitability of content near their ads to help them make informed decisions in order to reach their marketing goals.”

It’s another way to help advertisers feel comfortable about their Meta ad placements, with advancing automated tools now better able to scan and identify risks.

And with many Twitter advertisers still being cautious with their ad spend due to Elon Musk’s various changes at the app, this is clearly a significant area of industry concern. Latest reports indicate that the top 10 Twitter advertisers have cut their spending in the app by 89% this year, amid Musk’s push to allow more free and open speech, while Musk has also reinstated thousands of previously banned users in the app.

A lot of the ad dollars being pulled from Twitter could be coming Meta’s way instead – which is why initiatives like this are particularly important right now, in providing assurance for these brands.   

The new options will be made available to all advertisers in English language, with additional access on the way soon. Meta says that it will also start testing these on additional placements, including Reels, Stories and Video Feeds, providing more content assurance.

You can learn more about Meta’s evolving ad placement control tools here.