Snapchat’s looking to provide more assurance for advertisers via a new partnership with Integral Ad Science (IAS), which will see Snap work with IAS on a new brand safety reporting solution that’ll provide detailed insight into ad placement in the app.

Though based on IAS’ initial assessment, it does seem like its safety thresholds may need to be ramped up as well.

As explained by Snap:

“[The new partnership] will give advertisers transparency into the percentage of safe and suitable content their ads are appearing against. This will be aligned to the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) framework for brand suitability, and will be available to all advertisers in the coming months.”

The GARM Safety Floor Framework includes a range of agreed elements which are not acceptable to display advertising against.

IAS uses this as a guide for its ad placement assessment, providing advertisers with more assurance that their content is not appearing next to material of this type, which could potentially lead to negative association and brand harm.

And while Snap’s ad placements are more limited, and are already less likely than other apps to appear alongside these types of material as a result, I do find IAS’ initial assessment to be pretty high, in regards to safety:

“We also recently worked with IAS to conduct a measurement sample study on the advertiser suitability of our public content, specifically Spotlight and Creator Stories. In the study results, IAS found that both Spotlight and Creator content on Snapchat is 99% brand safe.”

I mean, again, Snap’s existing measures would stop a lot of this coming through. But 99% does seem high.

Worth noting that IAS also found that 99% of X (formerly Twitter) impressions also now appear adjacent to content ’deemed safe in accordance with the GARM brand safety floor’ in June last year.

Which, based on third party reports of more offensive, harmful content appearing on X, also seems high, but then again, this doesn’t measure overall content, only where ads can be placed.

So maybe it makes sense? IAS is a trusted provider of third party analytics, and I doubt this would be a mistake. Just seems high is all.

In addition to this, Snap’s also looking to give advertisers more brand safety controls at the campaign level, via a new setting that will enable you to place your ads alongside premiere content that’s been pre-checked.

“We launched the Creator Stories placement last year, which allows advertisers to place ads within creator content. In order to provide advertisers with more control when placing ads in this type of content, we’ve created a brand safety tool that will give advertisers the choice to add an extra layer of protection. When the filter is turned on, ads will appear near content that has passed additional brand safety content moderation filters. Otherwise, ads will be shown next to all available inventory.”

That’ll give advertisers another way to maximize safe placement in the app, which could provide more assurance for more marketing teams.

Snap’s been looking to improve its brand safety measures this year, as part of its broader effort to maximize ad spend, and get its business efforts back on track. The platform had a year of mixed results in 2023, with more users overall, but less usage in its key markets, in the U.S. and Europe. As a result, revenue growth has slowed, and now, Snap needs to reassess its efforts to secure more ad spend.

Improved brand safety is one way to do this, which could reduce hesitation among potential ad partners looking to experiment with the app.