Trust and transparency is the window to brand safety — and Twitter is opening that window to give brands a full view over what surrounds their ads at any moment.
For brands, Twitter offers a unique opportunity to reach an active and highly engaged audience. It’s the place where people come to connect, express themselves, find information, and participate in public conversations. Pew Research even called Twitter “the modern public square”.
But to take full advantage of the power of Twitter, marketers want to know that the platform is a safe space to build brand awareness, love, and loyalty. This is where Twitter’s holistic approach to brand safety comes into play, across policies that lead, products that protect, and partnerships that drive industry-wide change.
Twitter has been partnering with leading organisations around the world, tapping into diverse expertise, perspectives, and experiences to create the right products and policies for brand safety — not just for Twitter, but for the industry more broadly.
As an active and founding member of the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), Twitter has already been able to contribute to the creation of the industry-standard Brand Safety Floor and Suitability Framework. The purpose of the framework is to provide a common way to categorise sensitive content; provide transparency into where sensitive content may be present; and establish a method to report on special exception cases.
Partnering for better products
While Twitter builds proprietary solutions to enhance brand safety, it also partners with external technology providers and organisations to complement its efforts. For example, partnerships with DoubleVerify and Integral Ad Science — who are building solutions to provide independent reporting on the context in which ads appear on Twitter — has allowed the company to pioneer solutions that give advertisers transparency and more controls over their ads and conversations.
For example, placement controls give advertisers the ability to select the surface areas where their ads appear on Twitter, and avoid appearing in Search and on profiles, if desired.
Additional controls are available for advertisers running pre-roll through Twitter Amplify, enabling brands to select the categories of content they would like to appear next to, and to block specific publishers.These solutions are especially powerful in a real-time and dynamic environment like Twitter.
Further embracing independent brand safety measurement solutions, Twitter partnered with OpenSlate, a trusted third-party specialising in content safety. OpenSlate measured the safety of over 455,000 monetised Amplify videos in Q1 last year, and found all videos to be above the industry-standard GARM Brand Safety Floor.
Credibility backed by accreditations
As part of our mission to create a healthy environment for people and brands, Twitter agreed to undergo the accreditation process across all four of the Media Ratings Council’s Accreditation Services’ focus areas: Viewability, Sophisticated Invalid Traffic Filtration, Audience Measurement, and Brand Safety. Receiving this accreditation will demonstrate that Twitter’s brand safety practices are meeting industry standards.
Twitter was one of the first companies to receive the Brand Safety Certified Seal from the Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG), providing further independent validation of the company’s brand safety practices.
Policies to protect
In addition to products, Twitter collaborates with industry partners to gain insights and guidance on brand safety policies before they’re introduced. Policies are reviewed in consultation with expert organisations from around the world, such as the Trust & Safety Council, ensuring Twitter stays ahead of emerging threats and policy issues.
Find out more about Brand Safety on Twitter here.
Emily Foat is Twitter head of agency for Australia and New Zealand.
Have something to say on this? Share your views in the comments section below. Or if you have a news story or tip-off, drop us a line at adnews@yaffa.com.au
Sign up to the AdNews newsletter, like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter for breaking stories and campaigns throughout the day.