Twitter promises to show brands that ads are safe via new tools

Twitter is shining a light on timelines with a new program that will tell brands where ads appeared in relation to other tweets. This is the first time Twitter plans to report to advertisers what messages bookend their promoted posts, as brands have been demanding more insights into services like Twitter, Facebook and Google. On Monday, Twitter announced a series of updates that are meant to instill confidence in the platform, which has been hounded for years by harassment issues, disinformation campaigns, spam accounts, and even a troublesome president. Twitter is working with Integral Ad Science and Double Verify, “preferred partners for providing independent reporting on the context in which ads appear on Twitter,” the company said in its announcement. Lisa Utzschneider, CEO at Integral Ad Science, said in the announcement that her company would “partner with Twitter to pioneer in-feed brand safety solutions that will help advertisers navigate this dynamic social environment.” The feed environment can be a chaotic place for advertisers that are concerned about appearing next to objectionable commentary. Places like Twitter’s timeline, Facebook’s News Feed and YouTube’s recommendations can insert sponsors near content submitted by everyday users and popular creators and publishers; sometimes those posts don’t align with a brand. This year, the platforms and the ad industry have been trying to develop more accountability, especially with COVID-19, racial justice protests, and the elections turning the online world into an inhospitable landscape for advertisers at times. Facebook News Feed is seen as one of the most difficult environments, and the social network was the target of a brand boycott in July. Civil rights groups objected to how Facebook handled disinformation and hate speech in News Feed, and they recruited more than 1,000 brands to pull money from the service for a month. Facebook has since been working with advertisers to provide even more transparency about where ads run, to show the threat is low that their posts will appear near offensive material. Facebook releases a transparency report quarterly that outlines the extent of hate speech and other forms of bad content, and it shows how often it blocks that material. Twitter did not escape the brand scrutiny, either. The company warned that around the election, especially, many advertisers would be shy about marketing during tumultuous moments. Now, Twitter is adopting some of the same measures Facebook has taken. On Monday, Twitter said it would undergo an independent audit by the Media Rating Council to analyze the brand safety of the service. Facebook is working with MRC on a similar audit. Twitter also is working with the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, an industry group that was formed under the World Federation of Advertisers, to implement brand safety standards in digital media. GARM created a framework for handling brand safety agreed upon by platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Snapchat and TikTok. “Twitter’s personalized feed-based environment makes content adjacency inherently unique when considering brand safety questions,” Twitter said in its announcement. “It is critical to understand where associations occur, where they don't, and how those associations affect brands as we continue to invest in this area. Early research done by Twitter’s data science teams indicates that on our platform, adjacency between ads and divisive content has not yet been found to affect brand favorability.”

Twitter promises to show brands that ads are safe via new tools

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