Facebook is looking to avoid YouTube’s pitfalls by providing marketers a slew of tools to keep their ads away from less desirable content

Facebook
CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaks during the F8 Facebook Developers
conference on May 1, 2018 in San Jose,
California.
Justin Sullivan/Getty
Images

• Facebook is rolling out new brand-safety tools that
  will let advertisers see where their ads will appear before and
  after they run.
• It’s one part of a bigger pitch that Facebook plans to
  make around brand safety and transparency in the coming weeks,
  according to sources.
• Facebook also recently opened the floodgates to video
  advertising within Watch, which could lead to added
  brand-safety snafus as more ad space becomes available. So
  Facebook is looking to get out in front of any potential
  issues.

Facebook wants to prove that it has the technology chops to
address marketers’ brand-safety concerns — before something
really bad happens.

The tech giant is rolling out new tools to monitor when ads might
appear next to dicey content — think a graphic video or a
controversial news site like Breitbart. While Facebook has
stepped up its efforts to police content, including
hiring 3,000 people to specifically keep content from being
shared on the platform, brand safety is subjective for a lot of
advertisers and many marketers have asked for more control around
where their ads appearing.

The moves come on the heels of a string of high profile mishaps
in the digital ad realm, as big marketers found their commericals
running alongside less than desirable content.
This brand safety challenge became particularly acute on
YouTube, leading to several brand ad boycotts.

Facebook seems to be looking to get out in front of any such
challenges — or at least send the message to marketers that it
has a handle on brand safety.

Facebook hasn’t always given advertisers the complete
transparency they want

A year ago, Facebook rolled out a
set of brand-safety tools and the newest round of updates
seems intended to build on those efforts.

Three types of ads are considered “contextual,” according to
Facebook: In-stream ads that run during videos, ads that appear
in fast-loading Insant Articles pages and Facebook Audience
Network (or FAN), Facebook’s programmatic-like network that
places ads on hundreds of publishers’ sites.

Facebook is adding a tool that allows marketers to block specific
publishers from campaigns that run within Instant Articles and
in-stream videos before they run. For example, a media buyer can
cherry pick specific publishers or categories of content like
violence or debatable issues like politics.

Up until now, publishers have only been able to place those
parameters around ads that run within FAN where brand safety
within programmatic targeting is often a concern for marketers.

For marketers that don’t nitpick over whitelists and
blacklists, Facebook has tested providing so-called
publisher delivery reports once FAN and in-stream campaigns are
live but advertisers have complained that they are not able to
see where ads run beforehand when campaigns are planned across
multiple ad formats.

To address those concerns, Facebook is rolling out a tool that
will let marketers see a list of where their ads may appear
before they run across all three ad formats.

“We’ve been working with advertisers to build more controls
and we’re taking another step forward today,” said Carolyn
Everson, Facebook’s vp of  global marketing solutions, in a
statement. “
Now all advertisers, from global brands
to local businesses, will have access to comprehensive publisher
lists and delivery reports to better control where their ads
appear.”

All these moves are part of a broad push around brand
safety that Facebook plans to unveil during New York’s
Advertising Week in a few weeks, according to two sources.

More ads ads coming to Facebook Watch, as are more controls

After a couple of years of pushing significant amounts of video
onto the platform, soon Facebook will alllow for a much wider
range of publisher to run ads next to their content.

So Facebook wants to help brands make sure their ads run
alongside the appropriate Watch content as well.

Specifically, two weeks ago Facebook quietly opened the spigot on
video ads when it rolled out Watch globally. Up until now, a
small —
but steadily growing — percentage of US publishers have had
access to ad breaks that run within videos.

When Facebook flipped the switch on Watch across the world, it
included guidelines around how creators can make money from ad
breaks that play during their videos.

• Publishers are eligible for ad breaks if they’ve generated
  30,000 views (which are calculated as one minute) from their
  content over the past two months.
• Pages must also have 10,000 Facebook followers.
• The program is limited to publishers in the US, Australia,
  UK, Ireland and New Zealand and will expand to 21 other countries
  including Mexico and Belgium later this month.

In other words, any publisher that meets the standard will soon
be able to make money from Facebook’s various video ad products.
That’s potentially a lot of videos that can suddenly have ads
next to them.

YouTube also allows a wide swath of creators and publishers to
make money from their videos, though the company has had to

make significant changes to its platform ad ad program over
the past year to win back advertisers after its brand-safety
crisis.

Brand-safety snafus are bound to pop up on Facebook from the the
millions of pieces of content that are piped into the platform,
but the company is at least trying to get ahead of problems that
have plagued YouTube in the past year, which could finally

open up discussions with ad buyers about shifting big gobs of
TV money to the platform.

“Influencers, small publishers and people who don’t have someone
on the other end of the phone at Facebook are going to start to
realize that they can put their videos on Facebook and make
money,” said a source.

“I think they need to have that scale with content — later on in
Q4, they’re going to have a very different conversation going on
with brands to have a real ‘move your TV dollars here’
conversation.”