Today, Facebook’s advertising practices have been given a seal of approval by the Joint Industry Committee for Web Standards (JICWEBS), as Facebook, Facebook Audience Network, and Instagram have been awarded the DTSG Brand Safety Certification.

However, since beginning the audit process, Facebook and Instagram have been publicly lambasted for their roles in a number of brand safety blunders, many of which derived from the perils of allowing users to upload their own content, or a lack of human oversight in serving recommended content.

Commenting on today’s news, Angus McLean, director digital at Ebiquity, told Mediatel that Facebook has, however, made an important step to improve its brand safety credentials but it was not a perfect solution for what he described as a “complex and nuanced” issue.

Angus said:

There’s no question that brand safety remains a major headache for CMOs. Recent Ebiquity research revealed 65% of the UK’s top 100 advertisers had appeared in potentially non-brand safe environments. But as ever, the devil is in the detail: what is and isn’t a brand safe environment is inherently subjective in the vast majority of the cases.”

For example, the Facebook Audience Network contains 60,000 apps and sites that includes media titles such as Breitbart, which many brands may not consider brand safe.

While the JICWEBS certification applying overarching and familiar content rules to Facebook and Instagram is no doubt welcomed, it won’t change the fact that brands still need to carefully manage their brand safety given the complex nature of large digital platforms.” 

To read the full article on the Mediatel website, click here. 

Find out more in our report ‘Brand Safety in the UK: Willing to risk it? A report on Brand Safety and advertiser preference’ here. 

First featured on 17/09/2019.