Meta partners with Zefr for better ad management

In order to ensure the right placement of ads on its apps, Meta has partnered with  Zefr, a brand sustainability platform. This will help advertisers to better manage their ad placements and ensure that their placement of ads is not with imaginably damaging content.

YouTube and TikTok have also partnered with Zefr in this regard. Utilizing enhanced AI identification systems which include scaled human review,  frame-by-frame video analysis and audio text, it offers a personalized and precise brand safety solution enabling advertisers to control ad placements more specifically.

Meta sources said : “Starting with small scale testing in the third quarter and thereby proceeding to limited availability in the fourth quarter, we will enter into a partnership with Zefr developing a solution for the verification and measurement of appropriateness of adjoining content of the ads in the Feed”. The collaboration will lead Meta to create better systems to manage ad placements ensuring brand safety and leveraging on the potential of ad placement opportunity.

To give advertisers more hold over their ad placements, Meta is also building internal acceptability controls. With plans of testing in the second half of the year 2022 and introducing more extensively in the first half of 2023, the primary target is the English speaking markets. Meta has started developing the new controls for Instagram and Facebook feeds. Next year, the system will include Video Feeds, Stories, Instagram Explore, Reels, Stories and other areas, thereby extending to other languages.

Meta provides various brand safety tools which include ‘publisher allow list’ and ‘topic exclusions’. The introduction of these new options will help advertisers to be more precise with their ad placements and exclude the unnecessary ones and thereby also reach a broad audience.

YouTube has suffered great loss when the publishers have decided to take back their ads for them to appear with hate speech and extremist content. It is then back in 2017, that the topic of brand safety tools has received attention.

Meta banned the placement of ads, besides NSFW content, in 2013 and has been developing systems to manage this area. It has also faced a boycott by advertisers in the year 2020, when issues regarding its propagation of misinformation and hate speech have come to the surface. Thus it is of prime importance for Meta to focus on developing these new tools for ad placements.