Alveena Ahmad
On Thursday, Meta Platforms Inc announced the launch of a long-promised mechanism for advertisers to control where their ads appear, in response to their demands to remove their marketing from problematic remarks on Facebook and Instagram.
Three Risk Levels:
Three risk levels can be selected by advertisers for ad placement, with the most conservative option prohibiting placement above or below postings that contain sensitive content such as depictions of weapons, sexual innuendo, and political debates.
Also, Meta will provide Facebook advertisers with a report detailing the specific material they saw near their ads and how it was classified by Zefr.
It has long been advocated by advertisers that they should have more control over where their advertisements appear online, claiming that large social media companies do too little to prevent their advertisements from appearing alongside hate speech, fake news, and other controversial content.
Thousands of businesses joined a boycott of Facebook in July 2020 in response to anti-racism demonstrations in the US.
After a few months, Meta promised to offer tools to “better control advertising adjacency.”
In the future, Samantha Stetson, Meta’s vice president of Client Council and Industry Trade Relations, says Meta will add granular restrictions so marketers can indicate their preferences.
Stetson also said preliminary tests didn’t show any significant difference in advertising performance or price with more restrictive settings, adding that the participants were “pleasantly surprised
However, she warned that Meta’s auction-based ad system and its inventory reduction could shift the pricing dynamic.
Starting this year, the controls will be available in English and Spanish, with plans to expand to other regions – along with the company’s Reels, Stories, and video ad formats.
