Over 150 companies are pulling their ad spend from Facebook. So where IS it safe to advertise?

Thanks to Facebook’s repeated failure to meaningfully address the vast proliferation of hate on its platforms, over 150 brands have announced that they are boycotting the platform and pulling their paid social ad spend.

Find out why this is happening – and where it’s safe to advertise instead. 

Why are brands pulling out of Facebook?

The problem with advertising on social platforms like Facebook is that, while you can create targeted audiences, you can’t control what content your brand is going to feature against, as it appears in newsfeeds alongside lots of other things.

That means that your ad can sit among content that is in direct contravention of your brand values. 

Combine this with the criticism that Facebook isn’t doing enough to “effectively managing violent and divisive speech on their platform”, and brands like Hershey’s, Ben & Jerry’s, Adidas feel they have no choice but to stop advertising on the platform. 

Some have even joined the #stophateforprofit campaign in an attempt to “to force Mark Zuckerberg to address the effect that Facebook has had on our society.”

But these companies still need to reach and convert customers (especially in these difficult times). So where IS it safe to advertise?

Why display advertising is ‘safer’ than paid social like Facebook

As pioneers of lifecycle marketing for display, our objective is to protect your brand while delivering to your advertising KPIs. 

We also want to make sure that you are 100% confident you are focusing your advertising spend on publishing outlets and audiences that are not spreading hate and disinformation.

As such, we’re founding members of the Digital Trading Standards Group (DTSG) Gold Standard, which addresses the right principles of Brand Safety in Advertising

We also offer three layers of brand safety when running campaigns for our clients.

1) Why display advertising is safer at location level

 Here’s how we can protect your brand in terms of location:

  • Blacklisting – Global blacklists that ensure that we never feature adverts on publishers that proliferate hate
  • Whitelisting – Whitelists of publishing titles and groups that are well known and more objective in their content delivery
  • Direct deals – Direct private deals with publications that are completely aligned with your brand ensure that your ads are appearing in the right place
  • Adst.txt initiative – We target whitelisted publishers only

2) Why display advertising protects your brand in terms of context

Here’s how we can protect your brand in terms of context before asking for inventory:

  • Contextual intelligence – We index the category, keywords and context of over a billion URLs that we serve your brand inventory to
  • Exclusion categories – We also have exclusion categories to ensure that within your accepted locations, your brand is not served next to content in the wrong context. These categories includes: Hate Speech, Terrorism, Crime, Death, Drugs, Military, Obscenity, Terrorism, Adult themes to name a few

3) Why display advertising is safer on advert delivery

To protect your brand on delivery of your advert, we’re a global ad partner of Integral Ad Science. This means that every one of your digital ads is wrapped with an ‘adsafe’ wrapper as a final failsafe.

So if, for any reason, your ad appears on a location that has not been identified by any of the safeguards above, the final check looks at the page in real time and will block the ad from being served.

Our operations teams review these reports daily. And if any locations need be added to the two layers above, then they ensure they are.

Start achieving your KPIs with safer ads today

If you still need to meet your KPIs but are no longer confident using paid social on platforms like Facebook, then get in touch and find out how we can help.

Our intelligent display advertising campaigns are already surpassing our clients’ expectations, and we’d love to surprise you with exceptional results (from ‘safe’ ads) too. 

You can read some of our case studies here to get an idea of the work we do and the results we achieve.