Promoted feature: Balancing brand safety and campaign effectiveness with Facebook

Brand safety is a critical component to the success of any online advertising effort and the ongoing reputation of any brand. There are core fundamentals that any advertiser should consider when running a campaign. Is the platform where you are advertising a safe and welcoming environment for its community? Brands should feel confident that the ecosystem the platform has built is high quality, both in terms of the content being published and the publishers behind that content. Additionally, it is important to have controls in place so brands can manage how they place their advertising content.

Ultimately it comes down to people, transparency, and controls.

Protecting at-risk people

For the gambling industry there are additional layers of complexity, such as avoiding appearing alongside content that is targeted at, or specifically appealing, to minors or vulnerable groups.

We want to ensure that brands feel informed and in control when advertising on all platforms and placements across all Facebook apps and technologies by being transparent about policies and offering relevant controls.

The meaning of brand safety differs from one brand to another and is determined by product, industry or company culture. The reality is closer to a tolerance spectrum which considers safety, sensitivity and suitability. Each advertiser sits in a different position on this spectrum depending on brand health, performance, and business objectives.

User transparency and control

Ads that are independent of publishers appear in people’s Feed, Stories or Messenger alongside content from people and pages they have chosen to follow. Our goal is to create a safe and welcoming community; maintain a high-quality ecosystem of content publishers and ads and proactively collaborate with industry partners to make all online platforms safer.

There are two areas where ads can appear on social media platforms; those that are independent of publisher content and those that appear within publisher content.

Giving people power over what they are served has been an important focus for us. We’ve worked to improve our transparency by introducing ‘Why am I seeing this ad?’ and ‘Off Facebook Activity’ features so people understand why they are seeing specific ads and allow them to remove ads if they wish. This is leading user-focused functionality within the ad-tech industry.

Your target audience, sitting among our community of 2.8 billion people, curate their own feeds while we strive to ensure the content on our platform is within our standards. To this end, we have strict community policies which we impose. We use increasingly effective AI technology coupled with human reviewers to adjudicate on more opaque content and to enforce governance on user-generated content.

Custom tools for advertisers

At the same time, advertisers want control over their brand safety so they can balance the dual goals of keeping their brand safe while reaching their target audience and running effective media campaigns. We recognise that brands need tools and the in-built capabilities to do so, and a one-size-fits-all solution can be limiting.

We provide an array of advertiser controls for ads that appear within publisher content in order to provide that flexibility. Any good brand marketer wants to make sure that as much control as possible sits with them when it comes to who sees their ad content and where.

Our tools allow each brand to control their risk levels by being able to customise everything from placement, to publisher list selection (black and white lists), and category level inventory filters with associated delivery reports. Our on-target placement capabilities are recognised as industry leading in terms of precision – from age to interests – which is critical for the gambling industry.

In addition, Facebook’s solutions allow brands to use their first party data to protect and exclude individuals from being exposed to gambling brands’ marketing activity on our platforms.

Ruth Purcell is part of the real money gaming team at Facebook where she advises leading operators across Europe on their Facebook brand and media strategy. She has 17 years previous experience working as an operator in the gambling industry, including heading up marketing and brand, overseeing product development, responsible gaming, compliance and operations both in North America and Europe.