The Facebook ad protest started as a political statement, but has also touched a nerve that has nagged advertisers for years: brand safety.
Brands want assurances that their messages will not appear above, below or next to content that they find objectionable. It is a promise that is all but impossible to fully satisfy, but in recent weeks Facebook has been talking with advertisers about how it will finally tame its News Feed.
To that end, Facebook is developing new levels of transparency that would give marketers a better understanding about how it monitors hate speech and the context in which ads run. Ellie Bamford, VP of media at R/GA, says Facebook is working on ways to report to brands more information about what else is on the page when an ad runs in News Feed. Entities like the Media Rating Council can grade Facebook’s effectiveness in weeding out offensive material. There are companies like DoubleVerify, Moat and Integral Ad Science that can grade the brand safety of any given digital setting by analyzing comments, images and other media on the page.
But this is a problem that won’t be subject to any quick fix. “The News Feed, that is not a safe place at the moment,” says Bamford. “The only way to be 100 percent guaranteed that you aren’t going to experience an issue being around misinformation, or hateful content, or racist content, or unsafe content, is by not advertising there,” Bamford says. “That is the only way to avoid it right now.”
Bamford says that Facebook has developed brand safety measures for other parts of the platform, like its ad network, known as the Facebook Audience Network, and within video advertising, among other areas. She say that News Feed poses unique challenges and that some brands have to decide their threshold of risk before returning.
‘Stop Hate For Profit’
In June, the NAACP, Anti-Defamation League, Color of Change, Free Press, Mozilla, Sleeping Giants and other activist groups organized the boycott that they call Stop Hate for Profit, asking brands to freeze advertising on Facebook through July. The organizers say they have 1,000 brands on board, including Unilever, Pfizer, Starbucks, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and other big corporate signatories.
The movement started because of the Black Lives Matter protests, when masses of Americans marched for George Floyd, who was killed in May by Minneapolis police. The protesters’ outrage turned to Facebook after President Donald Trump used the service to stoke violence. In May, Trump went on Twitter and Facebook to say, “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” Groups like the NAACP took that as a threat against Black lives.