Meta’s Nicola Mendelsohn has said that advertisers are “very reassured” about its commitment to brand safety and suitability and its continued investment in the space—despite the company’s recent sweeping changes to its approach to content moderation.
Mendelsohn, Meta’s head of global business group, recounted her experience talking to business leaders and advertisers at the World Economic Forum in Davos from 20-25 January, saying that they were interested in “growth” and how Meta’s AI tools could help them grow.
“In Davos, one of the main things that was on the agenda were people, advertisers, business leaders talking about growth, where they could find growth, how growth could be more challenging. They were relying more on tools like Meta’s AI tools to help them deliver growth,” said the former Grey London and BBH exec.
“On some of the changes we’ve made and announced around content moderation and our approach here, actually they were very reassured by Meta’s ongoing commitment to brand safety, brand suitability, the continued investment we’re making when it comes to this whole area. That was basically the feeling in the room a couple of weeks ago,” she said.
At the start of this year, Meta announced a remarkable about-face when it came to content moderation on its platform. It dispensed with its third-party fact-checking service in the US and said that it had been “over-enforcing” its rules, “limiting legitimate political debate” and “censoring too much trivial content and subjecting too many people to frustrating enforcement actions”.
The move was widely criticised by many in the media industry. For instance, We Are Social Australia CEO Suzie Shaw told B&T: “Meta needs to have an open dialogue with advertisers to ensure concerns around brand safety are addressed, and offer solutions to pre-empt and manage issues arising with campaigns or within communities. For brands, it’s important that Meta offers clear ways to address incorrect or unfair flags, ensuring campaigns aren’t unfairly impacted.”
Meta reportedly held a recent call with large advertisers in the US to explain the changes and reaffirm its commitment to brand-safe advertising.
Monika Bickert, Meta’s VP of content policy said Meta wanted to remove content that contributed to increased safety risks, but “allow people to talk about the news and the world around them and not be overly restrictive” according to the Wall Street Journal.
Bickert said that Meta would be swapping the term “hate speech” which has “different meanings to different people” for “hateful conduct.
In practice, this would mean that the statement “women should not be allowed to serve in combat” for instance, would have been prohibited before, as a call to exclude people from a job based on their gender. Now speech of that ilk does not breach its content moderation policies but might be given a community note to add further context.
Mendelsohn was speaking on a virtual briefing to Asia-Pacific journalists about Meta’s AI-powered advertising tools. Later this month, Mendelsohn said that the company would be releasing its Opportunity Score feature to Asia-Pacific advertisers, as well as broadening its Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns to more advertisers and launching Advantage+ Leads, a new objective for shopping campaigns that will ensure high-quality leads.
Opportunity score gives advertisers the chance to improve performance by identifying and prioritising effective campaign recommendations in ads manager in near real-time, including recommendations about how to best leverage and use our AI and automation tools. Businesses will see their ‘opportunity score’ in Ads Manager (0-100 score), coupled with personalised, proven campaign recommendations to improve performance that can be applied with just a few clicks.
Meta Advantage+ campaign setup brings Meta’s AI-optimisations powering Advantage+ Shopping and App campaigns to more advertisers. Now when an advertiser sets up a sales, app install, or leads campaign, these AI optimisations will automatically be turned on, while maintaining the ability for advertisers to make manual adjustments if preferred. As part of this test, we will rebrand Advantage+ Shopping campaigns to Advantage+ Sales campaigns.
Advantage+ leads campaigns meanwhile introduce a new objective for full campaign automation, in addition to the existing sales and app campaign end-to-end solutions within Meta Advantage+. With Advantage+ Leads campaigns, advertisers can generate high-quality leads more efficiently using the AI-optimisations proven to maximise performance potential.
All this AI talk naturally raised concerns among the crowd—again around brand safety and responsibility.
“One of the things that’s really important to us is brand safety. We think about that when we’re building out products, and people’s safety as well, for that matter,” said Mendelsohn.
“Even if something is created by generative AI, it still has to comply to the rules and regulations that we have around community standards. But also why would an advertiser want to create something that didn’t apply to those standards? We have strict rules in that respect. And if anything was created and violated our standards, we would just take it down,” she added.
“On the brand safety perspective, we still have all of the tools, controls and commitments we’ve previously made to our advertisers out there. Again, this is something that advertisers can decide what level of controls they have on where they do or don’t want to place their advertising. That’s up to them. We’re going to continue, as Susan [Li, Meta’s CFO] said, to invest in this area because we know that it’s important for our advertisers.”