Brand safety is dead. Long live brand safety.
Earlier this month, Meta announced that it was ending its fact-checking program and lifting content restrictions on certain topics, all in the name of “discourse.” The company will instead rely on so-called Community Notes, similar to a feature on Elon Musk-owned X.
More controversially, the company updated its hateful conduct policy to allow certain types of transphobic and xenophobic content, according to guidance from the company. As a result, it could only be a matter of time until Meta-owned platforms get more toxic.
Casting aside any political calculus behind the decision, Meta’s policy shift stands to put advertisers in an awkward spot. The industry has spent the last decade preaching the importance of brand safety, despite frequent reports that have raised serious questions about the technology’s effectiveness (not to mention the economic effects it can have on the news business). In other words, if the world’s second largest ad platform isn’t worried about toxic content, why should the rest of the industry care?
Ahead of any potential pushback, Meta executives have tried to tamp down concerns. At Davos in late January, Meta executive Nicola Mendelsohn said in a roundtable discussion with Business Insider that the company had been speaking to advertisers about brand-safety concerns.
“We know how important it is for businesses to have transparency and control over their brand suitability, and we will continue to invest in this area,” she also wrote on LinkedIn. In the past, Meta has made exceptions to its content moderation policies for its largest advertisers.
Perhaps she could have saved her breath. Three agency execs told Marketing Brew that their clients aren’t yet concerned about Meta’s content moderation changes. In other words, it’s business as usual.
“I believe there’s a general confidence that common sense will prevail, and I’m sure that they will manage this very carefully,” Justin Billingsley, global chief growth officer at the S4 agency Monks, told us. “It’s not top of mind for clients that I’m dealing with.”
“We have not seen large-scale change in the platform, we are still working with them as one of our largest global partners,” Mike Bregman, chief activation officer at Havas Media, told Marketing Brew.
When asked for comment, Meta spokesperson Kash Ayodele pointed Marketing Brew toward previous public comments from executives, including Mendelsohn’s LinkedIn post.
Safety dance
In recent years, brand safety has evolved from an industry concern into a political cudgel as right-wing activists have claimed that the practice censors conservative media.
X owner Elon Musk, who faced his own advertising exodus after his takeover of the platform in 2022, has led some of the charge, describing industry guidance to pull back from the platform as an “advertising boycott racket.” X later sued advertisers, including Unilever and Mars, as well as two industry groups, the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) and the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), claiming that the groups violated antitrust laws by discouraging advertisers from running ads on the platform.
“This behavior is a stain on a great industry and cannot be allowed to continue,” X CEO Linda Yaccarino wrote on X around the time of the lawsuit. GARM disbanded shortly afterward, citing its limited resources available to fight the lawsuit.
Five months later, Meta’s rollback of policies that would have previously flagged or removed more controversial content is contributing to a new normal for advertisers who may have previously received more assurances about the kind of content appearing on the platforms they spend on.
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“Marketers have resigned themselves to this world where you won’t be able to do very much about brand safety or brand suitability,” Brian Wieser, principal at Madison and Wall, told Marketing Brew. “Wherever you can, you still will.”
Meta works with several brand-safety partners, including the two leaders in the category, DoubleVerify and Integral Ad Science, but even they are facing their own existential crises as advertisers and publishers question the reliability of the technology. Officials from the Department of Justice and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service have asked advertisers about the effectiveness of both companies, spurred by a series of reports finding that neither company prevented advertisers from appearing alongside racist and sexually explicit content, Marketing Brew previously reported.
Both DoubleVerify and Integral Ad Science’s stock prices have fallen over the past year. DoubleVerify’s is 50% lower than this time last year, while Integral Ad Science’s is 32% lower.
Advertisers appear to be less enthusiastic about the tech as well. According to a recent Forrester survey, 59% of marketing executives said they don’t think consumers care “as much as they used to” about brand safety. Another 53% said they were becoming “less prudish” about their approach to brand safety. These survey results led the firm to predict that in 2025, 10 “influential global brands” would drop DoubleVerify as an ad-tech partner.
Kelsey Chickering, principal analyst at Forrester, told Marketing Brew that the prediction was predicated on the fact that “when we look at current brand-safety practices, they’re frankly unsustainable.”
Even if there were no concerns about the technology’s efficacy, there are other questions. Namely, do consumers even remember digital ad placements?
“The archetypal brand-safety sales pitch is, ‘You wouldn’t want an ad for [an airline] showing up next to an article about airplane crashes, would you?’” Michael Bishop, a former employee of the now-defunct Oracle-owned brand-safety company Moat, told Marketing Brew. “I have never seen a study that actually measured the impact of that—and as far as I know, no such study exists.”
Zoom out: Some groups are calling for a boycott of Meta in the wake of its policy changes. In early January, GLAAD CEO Sarah Kate Ellis told Axios that she hopes “advertisers stand up and walk away.”
But unlike X at the time of Musk’s takeover, Meta has far more advertisers, including SMBs that have come to rely on its ad tools, making the platform more insulated from any kind of pullback. When brands including Coca-Cola, Dunkin’, and Unilever boycotted Facebook in 2020, it barely made a dent in the company’s bottom line. At the time, Facebook’s top 100 spenders only made up about 16% of the company’s quarterly revenue.
Though another pullback may be unlikely, some media buyers told us they are on high alert.
“I have less confidence today than I had 30 days ago or a week ago,” Joshua Lowock, president of media at Quant, told Marketing Brew. “The thing is, I don’t have evidence to back up my lack of confidence yet.”