Facebook Launches New Ad Safety Controls

Since the issue with YouTube placing ads near questionable content nearly all digital advertising platforms have been working hard to ensure their safety controls are up to snuff. Facebook is the latest to announce an update to their ad tools to further strengthen ad safety.

Building on their updates on Block Lists and Transparency Controls, Facebook has added an Inventory Filter that will allow advertisers to select from three levels of protection.

  • Full inventory selects minimal protection and ads may be delivered to all eligible content. This allows for the widest reach.
  • Standard inventory provides moderate protection and is the default choice when placing ads (this is the same as no category exclusions today). Overall this excludes sensitive content and gives a balanced reach.
  • Limited inventory offers maximum protection (similar to the opt-in category exclusions available today). Excludes all sensitive and moderate content, thus significantly lowering reach. This limited reach could also impact costs.

This new option gives advertisers another way to ensure brand safety for ad placements, but it is a more generalized option as opposed to advertisers being able to specify publishers or content types alongside which they do not want their ads to appear. Until now, advertisers could choose specific publishers or categories (debatable issues, mature content, tragedy and conflict, dating and gambling) in which they didn’t want their ads to appear. For some, this will cause some complaining, but they won’t whine about it too long. They’ll soon realize you can still block specific sites by creating a Block List to, eh hem, block specific URLs.

Afflecto believes that by aligning with industry standards to help simplify the brand safety experience Facebook is making it easier for advertisers to select their environment in which their ads show.