Commentary

Facebook Makes It Easier To Blacklist Publishers

Still struggling to reassure brands their ads won’t end up next to offensive content, Facebook is planning to unveil a series of new tools giving advertisers greater control over where their ads appear on its platform.

That includes its Audience Network, which allows marketers to reach audiences outside Facebook’s own sites, as well as its Instant Articles and in-stream ads.

The forthcoming offerings, announced Wednesday on the Facebook business blog, will enable advertisers to blacklist publisher sites at the account level. That should ensure their ads aren’t associated with racist or extremist content, fake news, incitements to violence, or any other types of content they deem unacceptable.

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Previously, advertisers could upload lists of publishers they wished to blacklist, including sites and apps, but they had to repeat the process for every campaign or ad run.

By offering the same capability at the account level, Facebook is streamlining the process so advertisers can permanently blacklist lists across all their current and future campaigns, including different creative executions and target audiences, if so desired.

The account-level blacklisting feature will first become available for the Audience Network and Instant Articles, with in-stream ads to follow later this year.

In a related development, Facebook is also planning to introduce a feature that will allow advertisers to preview where their ads could potentially appear on Facebook and across the Web, again covering publisher sites, the Audience Network, and in-stream ads. This preview function will work together with the account-level blacklisting function, so advertisers can see examples of their ads appearing on a range of different sites and cancel any they find objectionable.

Finally, another new capability allows publishers to more easily control what kind of delivery they use for video ads appearing on the Audience Network, for example, by specifying in-stream, native, or interstitial formats on sites outside Facebook. Publishers can specify which formats they want to avoid using an opt-out feature.

The new tools will help further refine Facebook’s existing ad controls, which allow advertisers to totally opt out of Instant Articles, the Audience Network or in-stream ads altogether, or block ads from appearing next to specific categories of content, like dating or gambling sites.
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