Brand Safety Floor + Suitability Framework

CONTEXT FOR THIS SOLUTION

Harmful content and its creators threaten the potential for digital media and disrupt the connections everyone seeks. The first step in safeguarding the positive potential for digital is to provide platforms, agencies, and marketers with the framework with which to define safe and harmful content online.

Our position is that you cannot address the challenge of harmful online content if you are unable to describe it using consistent and understandable language. Thus, we will adopt common definitions to ensure that the advertising industry is categorizing harmful content in the same way across the board. We fundamentally believe that, together, these definitions are the cornerstone for us to find balance between supporting responsible speech, bolstering public safety, and providing for responsible marketing practices.

With this framework of consistent categories in place, we will be able to improve transparency in the availability, monetization, and inclusion of content within advertising campaigns. This is essential to help platforms, agencies, and advertisers make decisions essential to the advertising industry.

GOALS FOR SOLUTION

This shared framework, which is activated by the IAB TechLab’s industry-wide taxonomy, will provide individual participants with:

Consistent Categorization: Ensuring that there’s a common way to categorize sensitive content

Transparency: Creating transparency for industry participants on where sensitive content may be present in the interest of consumer safety and responsible marketing

Clarity in Exceptions: Establishing a method for platforms to report on special exception cases in the interest of responsible speech and public interest

HOW THIS SOLUTION WILL BE USED

• Platforms may adopt, operationalize and continue to enforce monetization policies with a clear mapping to this Brand Safety Floor + Suitability Framework
• Platforms may leverage their community standards and monetization policies to uphold the Brand Safety Floor
• Advertising technology providers may adopt and integrate these definitions into targeting and reporting services via clear mapping or overt integration
• Agencies may leverage the framework to guide how they invest with platforms at the agency-wide level and at the individual campaign level
• Marketers may use the definitions to set brand risk and suitability standards for corporate, brand and campaign levels