Whether you’re a creator, a scroller or an advertiser, you’d have to be living way off the grid to avoid the impact TikTok has made on entertainment, culture and the digital media experience. The authenticity and creativity so evident on TikTok has attracted advertisers across nearly every imaginable industry, all interested in leveraging TikTok’s unique For You feed algorithm and set of marketing tools to get their brands in front of the right audiences.
Consequently, TikTok’s brand safety and product teams have become integral to advertisers. For those dedicated teams, it starts with safety—as well as a belief that brands advertising on TikTok know their own brand values best, explained Masoud Loghmani, general manager, brand advertising products, TikTok. In other words, each brand may have its own preferences about how it shows up online, especially when it comes to the content alongside their ads. This understanding has led TikTok to empower advertisers with choice, and partnering with advertisers, third-party partners and other industry leaders to redefine what’s possible in brand safety and suitability, Loghmani added.
An empathetic, intentional approach
Brand suitability, a distinction based on a brand’s unique preferences, voice and values, has long been a concept in traditional advertising. In 2022, TikTok brought this traditional concept to their platform when it launched its premier brand suitability control, TikTok Inventory Filter. TikTok Inventory Filter offers three distinct tiers of content filtration to help brands choose the type of user-generated content they’d like to have alongside their ads and branded content.
This foundational launch paved the way for TikTok to rapidly scale new suitability enhancements and innovations, most recently with the launch of Vertical Sensitivity and Category Exclusion, two tools aimed at giving brands the best in customizable options.
Vertical Sensitivity is an industry-first concept, catering to advertisers in verticals that might be particularly sensitive to certain content types. One of the verticals, travel, for example, may be used by a travel brand that prefers to avoid adjacency to user content about floods or earthquakes. In response to testing, iteration and advertiser conversations, TikTok built a suite of preconfigured content exclusions that addresses sensitivities specific to 11 verticals.
Category Exclusion controls allow advertisers to choose if their ads will run next to four non-standard categories: gaming and lotteries, violent video games, combat sports and youth content. By controlling association with these content categories, brands may be able to help maintain consistency in how their brand values present. For example, a software company that creates educational gaming products may prefer to avoid adjacency with user reviews of a mature video game about shooting aliens.
These two new tools layer atop the TikTok Inventory Filter, providing additional choice in the suitability of content appearing before and after ads. In doing so, TikTok goes beyond industry standards and guidelines, underscoring TikTok’s commitment to leading the industry.
“We’ve had very positive feedback from advertisers, who feel they’re now empowered to ensure their brand appears in context, and who seem consistently impressed by TikTok’s ability to push past the current frameworks to create new tools and solutions,” said Loghmani. “It’s very important to us to get feedback every step of the way and from every area of the ecosystem.”
A rapid rate of innovation, with safety and suitability in mind
TikTok approaches brand suitability as a balancing act, giving advertisers robust controls without it becoming an impediment to their experience.
“It’s a balance on the tip of a knifepoint,” said Loghmani. “We know our clients are very hungry for brand safety and suitability controls, but we also understand that comes with an immense responsibility of risks. A solution not fully working could have a negative impact on a brand’s reputation.”
TikTok uses automated moderation technology and human moderators to retain a rapid innovation speed without sacrificing control quality. The company’s technology looks at data points—including videos and images, video descriptions and text overlays—and labels content accordingly, while human moderators work to account for regional nuances in language, attire and other factors.
“We first launched these tools in 25 markets, which was incredibly significant, and now we’re in over 60 markets, so we’re continuing to stay at the forefront of global expansion in the suitability space,” said Loghmani. “We feel strongly that our measures address platform safety, and while we keep the platform safe, we prioritize suitability and provide choice for advertisers built on that safety.”
TikTok’s measurement partners—DoubleVerify, Integral Ad Science and Zefr—measured more than 130 billion impressions in over 32 languages in 2023. With the launch of these new pre-bid controls, campaigns have demonstrated average third-party success rates of more than 99% for brand safety and 98.6% for brand suitability across several ad campaigns.* Third-party measurement partners authenticate brand safety and suitability for in-feed placements by classifying the content directly above and below the ad, following industry standards.
In addition to measurement partners, TikTok teams up with industry experts, non-governmental organizations and industry bodies focusing on safety to inform and evolve its approach. Brand safety is a business of trust, and that trust is paramount to everything TikTok does, according to Loghmani.
“At the end of the day, we understand that we are custodians of the ecosystem,” he said. “We take this responsibility very seriously. Our TikTok community, advertisers and creators are impacted by every decision we make, and we know it is important to get safety and suitability right.”
* As measured by TikTok’s third-party measurement partners, 2024
