Will advertisers care about Twitter’s brand safety tools under new DoubleVerify deal?

By Marty Swant

Twitter’s new brand safety deal with measurement company DoubleVerify aims to attract advertisers, but some marketers say it’ll take more than tech partners to win a bigger share of their wallets.

The companies are rolling out a way to analyze where their ads appear within users’ timelines, giving marketers more context for understanding which tweets appear above and below each ad. Talk about the feature began in June 2022 — months before Twitter’s sale to Elon Musk — and expands on the companies’ contracts over the past few years to offer tools addressing viewability and ad fraud.

The new capabilities are being built by DoubleVerify’s Semantic Science team — which uses artificial intelligence tools to understand content — and will debut today, starting with U.S. advertisers for ads in users’ home feeds and later to other parts of Twitter like profiles and search ads. (This week, Twitter also announced a new beta test for ads within search.)

According to DoubleVerify CEO Mark Zagorski, advertisers will be able to know when ads appear next to text or images related to various topics to better understand the real-time context surrounding the campaigns. He added that the standards meet guidelines set by industry groups such as the Global Alliance for Responsible Media.

The head of social investment at a holding company media agency said the move is a positive and legitimate step forward for Twitter. “Adjacency verification is something we have been pushing [for], so this is an encouraging step forward,” said the exec, declining to speak for attribution.

“Social has become a risky business lately,” said Matt Barash, senior vp of Americas at Index Exchange. “Brands are sensitive to adjacency, context and environment and it’s important to have third-party tools in place to protect investment and maintain suitability.”

The updates come after reports that Twitter’s revenue was down year-over-year by 40% based on some estimates and down by 70% according to others. Twitter’s most recently disclosed earnings prior to going private showed second-quarter 2022 ad revenue of $1.08 billion.

Meanwhile, researchers have found that hate speech on the platform has increased since Musk acquired the company — a new lawsuit filed in Germany alleges Twitter has failed to enforce rules against antisemitic content. And yet, some marketers still seem to like buying Twitter ads despite ongoing brand safety concerns.

Zagorski said the launch shows that content verification can happen not just in static environments, but also in-feed environments. He added that brand safety issues are “really coming home to where it needs to be most, which is user-generated content and social media environments.”

“That’s where advertisers want to be,” Zagorski said. “It’s not easy to do because of the scale and scope of news feed environments, but it’s one that’s super important for advertisers. The level of engagement is awesome, but the level of risk is also pretty high.”

Whether the new deal with DoubleVerify will lead to more Twitter ad dollars is also an unanswered question. …read more

Source:: Digiday