TikTok partners with Zefr on brand safety and brand suitability measurement

January 24, 2022

New solution provides clients with third party impartial reassurance that their investment is delivered next to brand suitable content, protecting brand reputation and mitigating risk

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TikTok has partnered with leading brand suitability company Zefr to launch a new brand safety and brand suitability post-bid measurement solution for in-feed ads on TikTok in North America (US and Canada), UK and EU (France, Germany, Italy, Poland and Spain).¹


This solution will provide advertisers with campaign insights into brand safety and brand suitability for their TikTok campaigns. These insights provide clients with third-party impartial reassurance that their investment is delivered next to content suitable for their brand, protecting brand reputation and mitigating risk. Clients can use these transparency and video-level insights to monitor their campaigns and optimize if needed.


“TikTok is the fastest growing platform in the world, and this product partnership further signals their leadership position in GARM brand safety and brand suitability,” said Rich Raddon, co-founder and co-CEO, Zefr. “Audience attention continues to shift away from the open web towards platforms like TikTok, and Zefr is thrilled to introduce a new technical architecture that properly measures video and feed environments signaling a new era in the legacy measurement space.”


How does this partnership work?

Powered by Zefr’s patented Cognition AI machine learning engine, the new product provides advertisers with independent, video-level verification of their content adjacencies on TikTok, with full mapping to the Global Alliance of Responsible Media (GARM) brand safety floor and brand suitability categories.


“We see Zefr and TikTok’s partnership as an example of the type of collaboration between media stakeholders that is essential to achieving brand safety and suitability measurement, with video level transparency against GARM standards,” said Rob Pearsall,  Managing Director, Social Activation at Omnicom Media Group. “As OMG has demonstrated through our Council on Accountable Social Advertising, we see this a critical mandate on which social platforms must deliver, so being able to leverage new technology partners to better measure our adjacency in the TikTok feed is a very welcome and needed addition to the marketplace."


This new post-bid brand safety and brand suitability measurement product gives brands deeper insights and campaign analytics that are mapped back to each of the 11 GARM categories. Advertisers can activate the solution by choosing TikTok's pre-campaign Inventory Filter solution and combining it with Zefr's post-campaign solution to view their campaign performance against safety and suitability on the Zefr dashboard.²


"TikTok provides a platform for brands to safely showcase their products and services while also connecting them with diverse communities,” said Dave Byrne, Head of Brand Safety and Industry Relations. “We strive to build solutions responsibly, equitably, and openly so that people continue to create, watch, and share the content that they love. Our partnership with Zefr provides brands the opportunity and transparency to analyze and understand the impact of their campaigns that are safely running on our platform."


How the dashboard works

Zefr provides clients with a reporting dashboard that gathers insights at the campaign, video or creative level. This easy-to-use dashboard summarizes the brand safety and brand suitability rate for the account and by campaign level.


By clicking on each campaign, you can view the performance of the campaign against all of the GARM Suitability Risk categories. This section will also give you a breakout of the overall campaign performance.

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Furthermore, you can select a singular ad group to view its overall performance along with top videos. This also provides you with an ad group level breakout for safety and suitability. By clicking on the 'Create Report' option, you can download a sample report of the campaign in Excel format.


About Zefr's Cognition AI Engine

Zefr’s Cognition AI engine combines audio, text, and video frame-by-frame analysis with scaled human review and moderation. Backed by years of video training data, Zefr’s machine learning approach goes far beyond just text and creator analysis, combining video-level analysis with scaled moderation specifically mapped to the GARM industry standards. Zefr’s tech stack was built specifically for video platforms, as traditional approaches to brand safety in the open web like semantics and keywords were insufficient for the highly dynamic and nuanced world of video.




1. This post-campaign analysis product currently supports brand auction and reach and frequency campaigns with the reach and video view objectives only. It does not support reservation ads.

2. Zefr is a post-bid, post-campaign analysis product and must be coupled with pre-campaign, pre-bid brand safety filters such as first-party inventory filters or any other third-party pre-bid brand safety product.