TikTok has partnered with leading brand suitability company Zefr to launch a new brand safety and brand suitability post-bid measurement solution. The solution is for in-feed ads on TikTok in US, Canada, UK and EU (France, Germany, Italy, Poland and Spain).
This solution will provide advertisers with campaign insights into brand safety and brand suitability for their TikTok campaigns. These insights provide clients with third-party impartial reassurance their investment is delivered next to content suitable for their brand. The company says it will protect brand reputation and mitigating risk. Clients can use these transparency and video-level insights to monitor their campaigns and optimise if needed.
“TikTok is the fastest growing platform in the world. This product partnership further signals their leadership position in GARM brand safety and brand suitability,” said Rich Raddon, co-founder and co-CEO, Zefr. GARM – Global Alliance for Responsible Media. “Audience attention continues to shift away from the open web towards platforms like TikTok. Zefr is introducing a new technical architecture that properly measures video and feed environments. It signals a new era in the legacy measurement space.”
How does this partnership work?
Supported by Zefr’s Cognition AI machine learning engine, the new product provides advertisers with independent, video-level verification of their content adjacencies on TikTok. It also provides full mapping to the Global Alliance of Responsible Media (GARM) brand safety floor and brand suitability categories.
“We see Zefr and TikTok’s partnership as an example of the type of collaboration between media stakeholders that is essential to achieving brand safety and suitability measurement, with video level transparency against GARM standards,” said Rob Pearsall, Managing Director, Social Activation at Omnicom Media Group. “As OMG has demonstrated through our Council on Accountable Social Advertising, we see this a critical mandate for social platforms. To leverage new technology partners to better measure our adjacency in the TikTok feed is needed in the marketplace.”
The new post-bid brand safety and brand suitability measurement product gives brands deeper insights and campaign analytics. Data that are mapped back to each of the 11 GARM categories. Advertisers can activate the solution by choosing TikTok’s pre-campaign Inventory Filter solution. They can combine it with Zefr’s post-campaign solution to view campaign performance against safety and suitability on the Zefr dashboard.
“TikTok provides a platform for brands to safely showcase their products and services while also connecting them with diverse communities,” said Dave Byrne, Head of Brand Safety and Industry Relations. “We strive to build solutions responsibly, equitably, and openly. To enable people to create, watch, and share the content that they love. Zefr provides brands the opportunity and transparency to analyze and understand the impact of their campaigns running on our platform.”
How the dashboard works?
Zefr provides clients with a reporting dashboard that gathers insights at the campaign, video or creative level. The dashboard summarises the brand safety and brand suitability rate for the account and by campaign level.
By clicking on each campaign, you can view the performance of the campaign against all of the GARM Suitability Risk categories. This section will also give you a breakout of the overall campaign performance.
Furthermore, you can select a singular ad group to view its overall performance along with top videos. This also provides you with an ad group level breakout for safety and suitability. By clicking on the ‘Create Report’ option, you can download a sample report of the campaign in Excel format.
Enterprise Times: What this means for business.
This development sounds interesting. A continual fear for digital marketers is the appearance of their digital assets in less than savoury sites. Or adjacent to a brand the client would prefer to keep at a distance. It still remains a challenge for media buying companies to completely control the distribution of digital media inventory. Thus Zefr’s solution sounds interesting. The company’s tech stack was built specifically for video platforms. Traditional approaches to brand safety in the open web like semantics and keywords were insufficient for the highly dynamic and nuanced world of video.
Tiktok’s partnership with Zefr is definitely a step in the right direction for the social media company. However, it’s way too early to claim a leadership position in GARM brand safety and brand suitability. The company has developed a poor reputation for hosting dangerous viral “challenges” on its app. At their worst, these challenges have led to serious injury or death. There was the case of the blackout challenge that prompted Italian regulators to take action against the social network last year to remove underage users. So the social network is under pressure to clean up its act.
