Deepfakes: The Next Brand Safety Challenge

PLUS: Reddit's new Ads API… LinkedIn's new video ads… Changes to Instagram carousels… and more.

Keeping Your Ads Away From Deepfakes

A lot of brand safety tools for advertisers deal with adjacency — how close your ads get to pro-Nazi content, for instance. Your brand might not want its ads for school backpacks to be directly below a post about silencers on AR-15s.

Until now, the list of things to stay away from have been topic-driven: Violence, war, gambling, and so on. But now, we’re starting to see protection based on the origin of the content.

Integral Ad Science says it’s working on a new brand safety tool designed to keep deepfake content away from ad content.

This, of course, happening as AI-generated misinformation and fake images are continue to grow. A recent BBC investigation found that TikTok’s algorithm was recommending fake videos of political candidates making controversial statements.

IAS says its deepfake tool would be an industry first, though OpenAI has said it’s working on one of its own — both companies clearly trying to capitalize on brand safety anxieties.

Most analysts say the issue of deepfake ad adjacency is likely to worsen in coming years as generative AI becomes more widely available.

Google Sheets’ New Cell-Change Notifications

We don’t usually cover workplace software, but there is one update that I think could be pretty groundbreaking for marketers.

Google’s spreadsheets can now send conditional notifications — an email, whenever a specific cell or a range of cells change.

For instance, an ad campaign planning spreadsheet that tracks daily results could give a senior executive a heads-up whenever the CPA goes above a certain value.

Google Sheets have had notifications for a while, but they’ve been pretty simple — did something on the sheet change or not? Nothing at this cell-level.

These kinds of notifications have also existed in online databases like Airtable for some time. Excel can do it too, but it requires some heavy-duty coding.

Google’s email notification will show you what changed and who made the change, if it was human-generated.

This started rolling out this week and should be to most accounts by the end of the month — I say “most” because it’s only going to be available on Business, Enterprise, or Education plans. If you’re using Google Sheets on a free personal account, you’ll be out of luck.

Reddit Releases its Ads API for Third-Party Tools

Reddit continues to build out its ad platform — today announcing that the social media management platform Sprinklr will be its first partner to use its Ads API.

This API gives Sprinklr customers direct access to near real-time public conversations on Reddit. Sprinklr will be able to show relevant Reddit posts and comments in its app, and collect metadata like sentiment, topic trends, and so on.

It also provides a direct way to put ads onto the platform, without having to go to Reddit’s web site.

Reddit says now that they’ve got their first partner up and running, they’ve opened the new Ads API up to other developers and advertisers.

What’s not clear is just how open this is. Reddit recently clamped way down on its public API, jacking up the price by several magnitudes, forcing a lot of popular and well-loved third-party apps into closure. Presumably, Reddit will be hand-picking which partners get into the API, vs it being a truly open pathway.

LinkedIn’s New Video Ad Product: “The Wire”

LinkedIn has a new ad product available.

It’s called The Wire and lets you run in-stream video ads placed alongside content from publishers that LinkedIn considers trustworthy.

Those publishers include Bloomberg, Business Insider, Forbes, MarketWatch, NBCUniversal, Reuters, The Wall Street Journal and Yahoo Finance.

Social Media Today speculates that these publishers might even get a small cut of ad revenue placed beside their stories.

LinkedIn is also adding some AI stuff, of course — image generation based on your own assets, those (rarely helpful) ad platform “recommendations,” and you’ll also now be able to add targeting exclusions using third party lists.

Changes to Instagram Carousels Coming

Instagram is testing some new content features, in particular the ability to add text overlays on individual images inside of a carousel.

This might be a helpful thing for explanations, how-tos, and so on.

There are also some new carousel formats:

Original: Photos are displayed in full size.

Portrait: Photos are cropped to a vertical format.

Square: Photos are cropped to a square format.

Honestly, now that this is an option, I’m not sure why we wouldn’t all just start using Portrait, since that will take up the most real-estate on the screen.

Google Data Will Soon Auto–Import to Microsoft Ads

Microsoft is warning advertisers that if they’ve imported campaign data from Google Ads to their Microsoft Ads account, starting from about two weeks from now, Microsoft will keep importing your Google conversion data automatically. You may or may not want this.

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