Event Recap
Zefr recently partnered with the 4A’s for their Decisions 2024 event series to host the official kick-off dinner and cocktail reception at their offices in Los Angeles.
The event featured a workshop presentation and discussion in partnership with Meta, where Kathleen Canfield, Head of Government & Social Impact, Americas at Meta, presented alongside Brittany Scott, VP, Measurement Partnerships, Zefr, for “The Election Readiness Playbook: Actionable Insights & Updated Strategies for Navigating Brand Suitability in 2024.” The presentation was introduced by Ashwini Karandikar, EVP of Media, Technology, & Data at the 4A’s.
Canfield presented Meta’s comprehensive approach to elections, while Scott provided Zefr’s perspective on how both companies are committed to providing proactive tools as well as reactive strategies for brands ahead of this year’s election to ensure brand safety.
Meta’s presentation featured five key pillars around their comprehensive approach to elections, including facets such as advanced security and safety operations, their industry-leading work with fact-checking networks, brand safety and suitability controls, enforcement of Meta’s community standards and more. Canfield also shared news around Meta’s recent announcement that they plan to label organic AI-Generated images on Facebook, Instagram and Threads, and touched on Meta’s approach to helping people understand when AI or digital methods are used in political or social issue ads.
On the topic of suitability and choice, Canfield spoke about Meta’s approach to political content based on feedback they’ve received from people:
“People have told us they want to see less political content, so we have spent the last few years refining our approach on Facebook to reduce the amount of political content — less than 3% of what people see in their Feed is political content.”
Canfield also touched on Meta’s newest brand suitability controls they rolled out last year — called Inventory Filter — that allow advertisers to control the sensitivity level of the organic content that their ads appear next to on Facebook and Instagram Feed and Reels, based on their own preferences, in alignment with GARM’s brand suitability framework.
Zefr then talked about the realities and challenges brands face around breaking news cycles and brand safety scares that may occur on user-generated social platforms, including in regard to to political and electoral content and misinformation.
“As much as we’d like to plan, when you’re working on user-generated social platforms, trends happen overnight and things change, which is why solutions like controls are an important additional measure to give brands peace of mind.”
Zefr spoke about their measurement tool that independently classifies adjacent ad campaign content on the platform to help brands better understand what they are running against, including advanced misinformation identification capabilities built into our product, and the importance and timeliness of this in 2024:
“This is relatively new — this is the first US presidential election where brands will actually have insight into where their ads are running.”
Zefr is partnering with many global enterprise brands to strategically navigate election season by offering tools focused on timely responses to current events, understanding brand exposure to election-related content, and avoiding misinformation and brand misrepresentation.
Other key takeaways from the presentation and discussion included the following:
“We’re all buckled up for this election season but we don’t know exactly what’s going to come our way, so having technology that is flexible, that can scale as the landscape scales is extremely important.” — Brittany Scott, VP Measurement Partnerships, Zefr
“We’re both deeply committed to making platforms safe for people and safe for brands.” — Kathleen Canfield, Head of Government & Social Impact, Americas, Meta
“Having this commitment from Meta to continually improve the ecosystem to take our signals and the exposure data and to improve the effectiveness not only for singular brands but for the entire platform is a testament to the commitment to the space and the work.” — Brittany Scott, VP Measurement Partnerships, Zefr
“One of the best things about the oversight board, similar to Zefr, is that they’re independent of us. They’re not connected to us. And when someone disagrees with a decision we’ve made about content whether we’ve left it up or left it down they can appeal it to the oversight board and then that decision is binding.” — Samantha Stetson VP, Client Council and Industry Trade Relations, Meta
Thank you to our partners at the 4A’s and Meta for your ongoing partnership and work in this space. We look forward to continuing this important conversation in 2024.
For more information about this presentation and the event, please contact press@zefr.com.
