Exclusive: Meta unveils brand suitability controls for Reels

The company also announced a host of new creative tools for advertisers on Reels.

By Katie Hicks October 10, 2023

Today Meta rolled out brand safety and creative tools for Reels advertisers, expanding the brand suitability controls it released for Facebook and Instagram feeds in March.

Meta’s inventory filter uses AI to help sort organic content into categories aligned with Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) suitability standards, a framework that helps identify content related to topics some marketers may not consider brand safe, such as ​“arms and ammunition,” ​“spam or harmful content,” and ​“adult and explicit sexual content.” Zefr, a third-party verification service, provides advertisers with reporting on how Meta’s inventory filter performs.

The inventory filter lets advertisers choose whether they want ads to appear next to content on an expanded, moderate, or limited basis according to its content classifications. Some content, such as anything that promotes illegal drugs or misinformation, cannot be monetized, according to Meta’s policies.

The update is part of a broader overhaul of Meta’s brand-safety functions. Samantha Stetson, VP of client council and industry trade relations at Meta, told us that the decision to start with the feed came from client interest. From there, the ​“next obvious place” to begin testing was Reels given how much the short-form offering has grown in use, hovering around 200 billion views per day.

“It definitely took us time the first time around, because of the complexity, but the great thing is now that the underpinning of the taxonomy, and how to read it, and the AI, can be translated to help us expand it to placements like Reels,” Stetson said.

Advertisers will be able to see what types of content falls under which category in the Zefr portal, Stetson said, which can help brands understand what the difference between expanded versus limited means in practice.

Rich Raddon, co-CEO and co-founder of Zefr, said clients can offer feedback on how content has been classified and what they consider to be low- or high-risk organic content, sometimes leading to conversations between Zefr’s policy team and clients. ​“The beautiful thing about all these models is they get better and better the more training data they have in them,” Raddon told us.

Beyond expanding to Reels, Stetson added that brand suitability tools have been expanded to include Arabic, Chinese, French and Portuguese, in addition to Spanish and English.

On the creative side, advertisers will also now have access to new formats and tools to create ads for Reels, including:

• “Collection ads,” which appear in the Reels feed as one large image or video with smaller product images closer to the bottom of the screen
• Multi-destination CTAs for Reels carousel ads
• “Swipe left” functionality, so users can quickly access product or landing pages
• Optimization features, like size conversions and filters to sharpen color and boost video resolution, as part of Advantage+, an AI-powered offering for advertisers
• Music selections for single-image Reels ads, also as part of Advantage+

The changes come as Meta continues to invest in generative AI; last week, the company unveiled several AI-driven tools to help marketers create ads on the platform, letting brands create various images or text for ads depending on who they’re trying to reach.