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As Fears Rise Advertisers Declare Truce With Platforms

Brand safety has become a major concern for advertisers in recent years. That concern reached a pinnacle as advertising on digital platforms outstripped all the rest. It is not that radio and television channels, newspapers and magazines are free from objectionable content within which ads can be placed. Advertisers are mostly OK with that stuff, sometimes endorsing the content. They want the ability to choose their space. Bot-placed digital ads on social media platforms have been outside their control.

very coldAdvertisers and the brands they present took a step toward control over the placement of their messages on major social media platforms. An agreement was reached last week (September 23) between the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) and social media giants Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. It is a small step but increments are better than losing the money.

“The issue of harmful content online has become one of the challenges of our generation,” said WFA chief executive Stephan Loerke in a statement. “A safer social media environment will provide huge benefits not just for advertisers and society but also to the platforms themselves.” Facebook VP for global marketing solutions Carolyn Everson referred to it as an “uncommon collaboration” providing a “unified language to move forward on the fight against hate online,” quoted by CNN (September 24). “This is not a declaration of victory,” added Mars global marketing officer Jacqui Stephenson. “There is much work to be done and we rely on all of our platform partners to follow through on their commitments with the pace and urgency these issues demand.”

As the coronavirus pandemic and resulting economic fallout raged last July several big name advertisers boycotted social media platforms for failure to address brand safety concerns. A year before the WFA enumerated a dozen brand safety categories of concern to advertisers. Later the IAB (Internet Advertising Bureau) forced a 13th to the list: hate speech.

The social media platforms agreed to several points set out by the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), led by WFA. At the top, as in every conflict negotiation, are a common definitions of terms, like hate speech. There will be an independent audit of how “harmful content” is categorized, reported and removed. The social media platforms also agreed to deploy “tools” to manage ad placement. This was the result of a 15 month process. Details will be released later this month.

The shoe is sometimes on the other foot. Ads are regularly misclassified or mislabeled, noted DigiDay (September 25), as programmatic ad servers (bots) are directed to place ads on a variety of digital platforms to fill targeting objectives. This is an issue with political ads, especially during this US election season. With political ad spending on digital platforms racing toward US$1.5 billion, “most publishers with programmatic businesses cannot say no to the infusion the ads provide every (election cycle), especially in a year when the coronavirus-induced downturn which has hit publishers’ bottom lines hard.”

Publishers - and this would include social media platforms - generally accept the metadata sent by the programmatic ad bots classifying each ad. Hiring legions of human reviewers to check out each and every ad coming down the proverbial pipe is beyond the capacity of most publishers. Online publisher Salon chief revenue officer Justin Wohl has “seen” one US presidential campaign misclassify ads as consumer electronics. “With as many demand partners as there are in a typical programmatic stack, blocking every possible attempt through every possible channel is exceedingly difficult, especially when there’s deception and mislabeling going into the buys in the first place. The right-leaning ads are the ones that lead to angry emails from readers,” he added, “so they’re much more so on our radar.”


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