Social media platform X, formerly Twitter, is seeking to set the record straight after its brand safety rating on a key platform utilized by major media advertisers displayed an inaccurate rating for 4 and a half months.
X’s brand safety rating on DoubleVerify, considered one of the leading sources for media holding corporations to examine the security and suitability of a given platform for promoting campaigns, was displayed as an erroneously low figure from late October of last yr until last month.
While DoubleVerify (DV) noted that the underlying data was correct and it was just the display graphic that was incorrect, X says that low figure dissuaded advertisers from spending on the platform.
This comes as advertisers have pulled back their spending on the social media platform following its takeover by an ownership group led by Elon Musk, citing concerns around content moderation policies that might hurt their brand by promoting on the platform.
“The industry has said no platform ought to be grading their very own homework,” X head of business operations Joe Benarroch told FOX Business. “Get a third-party verifier. Don’t tell us that our brand is secure, let anyone else tell us our brand is secure and the entire marketplace dumped a complete amount of money into these corporations, DoubleVerify being one. We deepened our partnership with DoubleVerify on the request of each media holding company and on the request of each big brand marketer.”
Media holding corporations that manage the promoting campaigns and spending for various big-name corporate brands check brand safety scores and brand suitability rankings of varied platforms for campaigns they’re involved with.
DoubleVerify and Integrated Ad Science have emerged because the leading sources for those figures, with an industry standard brand safety rating of 99% the benchmark for platforms to strive for.
Benarroch said that in the course of the period where inaccurate figures were presented on DoubleVerify, X’s brand safety rating ranged from the 70s to the 90s – below the benchmark, which caused advertisers to balk at running campaigns on X.
That caused a ripple effect at media holding corporations with quite a few brands as pulled back from promoting on X since it was showing up as being less secure than rival platforms “over and all over again,” Benarroch said.
He added that X has invested heavily in additional brand safety tools since CEO Linda Yaccarino joined the corporate in June, with the corporate allocating an “incalculable” period of time and investment into “attempting to rectify what was not an issue, but what was told to us was an issue.”
X CEO Linda Yaccarino wrote in a post on the platform that “advertisers rely on tools and accurate rankings to find out ad partnerships,” adding that, “Now that the error has been recognized, apologized for and corrected – I urge those advertisers who’ve made partnership decisions with X based on the erroneous data to reconsider.”
DoubleVerify CEO Mark Zagorski wrote a letter to customers to notify them that, “DoubleVerify recently discovered a graphical error within the display of X’s Brand Safety Rate in DV’s Pinnacle dashboard that resulted in displaying an incorrect, lower rate.”
“Specifically, DoubleVerify’s dashboard incorrectly mirrored the Brand Suitability rate in your campaign onto the Brand Safety Rate within the summary graphic in Pinnacle. The underlying data available in DV Pinnacle was accurate, only the graphical visualization was not representative of the Brand Safety Rate,” Zagorski wrote.
“This display error occurred over 4 and a half months from October 24, 2023, to March 14th, 2024, when it was corrected by DV. All current and retroactive Brand Safety data is now appropriately represented in Pinnacle. The display error was not present in some other area within the UI, including the Incident Reporting and the Rollover Data Detail,” he explained.
“Based on DoubleVerify’s metrics, X’s Brand Safety Rate across all campaigns we measured exceeded 99.99% from October 2023 to the current. Because of this X’s Brand Safety Rate exceeds global benchmarks for brand safety, based on DV’s global industry data.”
“DoubleVerify takes measurement accuracy and reporting seriously. We take full responsibility for the wrong visual representation of X’s Brand Safety Rate inside our dashboard that displayed an inaccurate and lower Brand Safety Rate. We apologize for any confusion this will likely have caused to X and to our customers in the midst of reviewing your campaign performance on X,” Zagorski wrote.
He added that DV is working with X to make sure future reports accurately reflect the Brand Safety performance of campaigns on the platform and that it’s undertaking a review of its systems and processes to stop the difficulty from occurring again in the long run.
Social media platform X, formerly Twitter, is seeking to set the record straight after its brand safety rating on a key platform utilized by major media advertisers displayed an inaccurate rating for 4 and a half months.
X’s brand safety rating on DoubleVerify, considered one of the leading sources for media holding corporations to examine the security and suitability of a given platform for promoting campaigns, was displayed as an erroneously low figure from late October of last yr until last month.
While DoubleVerify (DV) noted that the underlying data was correct and it was just the display graphic that was incorrect, X says that low figure dissuaded advertisers from spending on the platform.
This comes as advertisers have pulled back their spending on the social media platform following its takeover by an ownership group led by Elon Musk, citing concerns around content moderation policies that might hurt their brand by promoting on the platform.
“The industry has said no platform ought to be grading their very own homework,” X head of business operations Joe Benarroch told FOX Business. “Get a third-party verifier. Don’t tell us that our brand is secure, let anyone else tell us our brand is secure and the entire marketplace dumped a complete amount of money into these corporations, DoubleVerify being one. We deepened our partnership with DoubleVerify on the request of each media holding company and on the request of each big brand marketer.”
Media holding corporations that manage the promoting campaigns and spending for various big-name corporate brands check brand safety scores and brand suitability rankings of varied platforms for campaigns they’re involved with.
DoubleVerify and Integrated Ad Science have emerged because the leading sources for those figures, with an industry standard brand safety rating of 99% the benchmark for platforms to strive for.
Benarroch said that in the course of the period where inaccurate figures were presented on DoubleVerify, X’s brand safety rating ranged from the 70s to the 90s – below the benchmark, which caused advertisers to balk at running campaigns on X.
That caused a ripple effect at media holding corporations with quite a few brands as pulled back from promoting on X since it was showing up as being less secure than rival platforms “over and all over again,” Benarroch said.
He added that X has invested heavily in additional brand safety tools since CEO Linda Yaccarino joined the corporate in June, with the corporate allocating an “incalculable” period of time and investment into “attempting to rectify what was not an issue, but what was told to us was an issue.”
X CEO Linda Yaccarino wrote in a post on the platform that “advertisers rely on tools and accurate rankings to find out ad partnerships,” adding that, “Now that the error has been recognized, apologized for and corrected – I urge those advertisers who’ve made partnership decisions with X based on the erroneous data to reconsider.”
DoubleVerify CEO Mark Zagorski wrote a letter to customers to notify them that, “DoubleVerify recently discovered a graphical error within the display of X’s Brand Safety Rate in DV’s Pinnacle dashboard that resulted in displaying an incorrect, lower rate.”
“Specifically, DoubleVerify’s dashboard incorrectly mirrored the Brand Suitability rate in your campaign onto the Brand Safety Rate within the summary graphic in Pinnacle. The underlying data available in DV Pinnacle was accurate, only the graphical visualization was not representative of the Brand Safety Rate,” Zagorski wrote.
“This display error occurred over 4 and a half months from October 24, 2023, to March 14th, 2024, when it was corrected by DV. All current and retroactive Brand Safety data is now appropriately represented in Pinnacle. The display error was not present in some other area within the UI, including the Incident Reporting and the Rollover Data Detail,” he explained.
“Based on DoubleVerify’s metrics, X’s Brand Safety Rate across all campaigns we measured exceeded 99.99% from October 2023 to the current. Because of this X’s Brand Safety Rate exceeds global benchmarks for brand safety, based on DV’s global industry data.”
“DoubleVerify takes measurement accuracy and reporting seriously. We take full responsibility for the wrong visual representation of X’s Brand Safety Rate inside our dashboard that displayed an inaccurate and lower Brand Safety Rate. We apologize for any confusion this will likely have caused to X and to our customers in the midst of reviewing your campaign performance on X,” Zagorski wrote.
He added that DV is working with X to make sure future reports accurately reflect the Brand Safety performance of campaigns on the platform and that it’s undertaking a review of its systems and processes to stop the difficulty from occurring again in the long run.
