As Facebook commits to independent GARM brand safety verification, getting YouTube, TikTok, Twitter and others on board is a diplomatic dance

By Kate Kaye

For a global partnership between the top social media platforms and brands to create brand safety measurement standards to move ahead, the side holding the purse strings wants a lie detector test.

Nearly two years after its formation, the World Federation of Advertisers’ Global Alliance for Responsible Media, or GARM, has made progress toward creating a standardized set of brand safety measures agreed upon by platforms and advertisers. In April, the group — whose members include YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Snap and Pinterest as well as big-spending global brands like Anheuser-Busch InBev and Unilever — published its first first Aggregated Measurement Report, which featured entirely new brand safety metrics. However, the milestone is marred by the participating platforms supplying their own, unverified measurements.

GARM aims to change that.

The next step is getting the platforms on board to allow an independent auditing firm to sign off on the transparency reporting data supplied to GARM by the platforms. Thus far, only one — Facebook — has committed. But, the rest remain holdouts. There is no indication yet that the other platforms participating in GARM will agree to allowing third-party auditing of the information they provide to the brand safety transparency group.

“These are ongoing conversations that the GARM Steer Team is having with each of the platforms to make sure that they follow through with their MRC accreditation in a way that is sustainable and appropriate,” said Rob Rakowitz, initiative lead at GARM.

He said that some platforms have fewer resources such as people or budget to fulfill audit requirements, for example. “It would be in everybody’s best interest that there is third-party verification on these numbers,” he said, adding that GARM members expect independent audits eventually to be an integral part of the reporting process.

“They will not be dodged,” said Rakowitz of the potential audits.

The state of platforms playing ball

Facebook publicly stated in July 2020 it would allow for the industry’s go-to measurement verification body, Media Rating Council, to evaluate its compliance with GARM’s brand suitability framework, in the hopes of garnering accreditation for the MRC brand safety guidelines for monetized content. However, those words have not yet resulted in tangible results. Although the company is the only one of the platforms that has publicly agreed to MRC conducting an audit of its brand safety transparency reporting for GARM, and plans an independent audit of its self-published content enforcement and standards reports, no MRC brand safety auditing specifically related to GARM reporting has been done at Facebook as of this article’s publication.

Separately, but on related trajectories, both Facebook and YouTube are working with MRC on brand safety-related audits that are not GARM-specific. Facebook is set to commence an MRC audit related to brand safety metrics in June. And Google-owned YouTube has received accreditation from MRC for its brand safety processes that evaluate content on the platform at the individual video level for ads bought through YouTube’s reservation program or through Google’s ad tech. But it has yet to commit to an audit …read more

Source:: Digiday