Twitter is giving brands a closer look at where ads run on the service to check if any bad tweets surround promoted posts, which is the first major brand safety update since Elon Musk bought the company. Twitter’s new safety tools come through partnerships with DoubleVerify and Integral Ad Science, announced on Wednesday, that may help Twitter start to unravel the exodus of brands that depleted its ad revenue in recent months.

“We look at the tweets before and after an ad,” said Mark Zagorski, DoubleVerify CEO, in an interview this week, describing the new product, “to ensure that brand safety and suitability filters, that the advertisers had built with Twitter, were adhered to.”

Twitter has always been an uncertain place for advertisers, just like much of social media, where brand messages intermingle with comments from everyday users. Twitter has been working on brand safety controls for more than two years, as advertisers have been clamoring for more details about the context in which ads appear. For instance, family-friendly brands don’t want promoted tweets to run near posts that contain profanity, hate speech or offensive imagery.

In October, after Musk finalized his $44 billion purchase of Twitter, brands grew even more worried about the environment. Musk implemented less restrictive moderation policies and unbanned thousands of accounts that the previous Twitter regime had blocked for violating its rules. Musk has been vocal about his desire to give Twitter users a wider berth to spout their opinions without running into terms of service violations. Brands feared that could mean more exposure to offensive speech.

Advertisers have fled Twitter in recent months. In December, Twitter’s ad revenue dropped 71% compared to the prior year, according to new data from Standard Media Index, which tracks spending from a basket of the top advertising agencies. Standard Media Index does not track every ad dollar that Twitter makes, but it follows a pool of most of the biggest spenders in digital advertising. While Twitter’s year-over-year ad revenue dropped 71% in December, TikTok’s ad revenue increased 13%, according to Standard Media Index. As for the entire social media ad market that Standard Media Index tracks, year-over-year ad sales dropped 15%, suggesting that the market faces broader troubles.

In place in time for the Super Bowl

Since November, the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, an industry working group that develops standards and content ratings on social media, has been working with Musk and Twitter to reach an accord around brand safety controls. Prior to Musk, Twitter had been an enthusiastic contributor to GARM. In 2020, Twitter promised it would give brands reporting mechanisms to independently verify that ads ran in safe settings. The new services from DoubleVerify and Integral Ad Science are a first step, and mimic similar tools they built for TikTok, which is owned by Chinese-based ByteDance.

“We’re focused on marketers that want more transparency into the adjacencies where their ads are running,” said Craig Ziegler, senior VP of product at Integral Ad Science.

Integral Ad Science and DoubleVerify will be able to analyze ad campaigns that run in the Twitter timeline, which is the main feed that users scroll on the site. The tools do not cover promoted tweets that appear when users scroll through tweets served in search and within individual profiles, a blind spot that could be the next category to cover in updates to the program.

Also, the verification firms will only be able to see one tweet above an ad, and one tweet below an ad, analyzing those for any objectionable content that falls outside a brand’s suitability guidelines. That means two tweets away, there could still be content that goes undetected.

Twitter’s new brand safety levers are open to thousands of advertisers who work either with DoubleVerify or Integral Ad Science. The tools will be operational during the Super Bowl, an important advertiser moment on Twitter when the conversation on the site is most active.

“The timing is no coincidence, right,” Zagorski said. “We know that social interactions around major events, and Super Bowl is one of them, obviously increases. So, I think now is great timing for advertisers who want to engage during the Super Bowl on Twitter to know that there is a brand safety and suitability tool that can help them measure and verify the success of their campaign.”

“We are excited to offer advertisers the ability to leverage DoubleVerify’s independent measurement to verify brand safety and suitability on Twitter’s Home Timeline,” AJ Brown, Twitter’s head of brand safety, said in a statement for DoubleVerify’s announcement. “DV was chosen due to its industry-leading technology, depth of media quality measurement expertise, and the overall strength of our existing partnership.”