Facebook has agreed on the scope of its brand safety audit by the Media Rating Council, though the initial phase will not include the social network’s news feed. Facebook first committed to the brand safety audit in late June amid growing pressure from more than 1,200 advertisers and campaign groups to take more effective action against the spread of hate speech and misinformation on its platform. And an MRC accreditation would be seen as an important stamp of approval to indicate a platform’s internal controls and measurement systems can be trusted to work effectively and without bias. Read more below.

• The initial scope of the new audit will assess the brand safety processes applied to monetized ad placements within Facebook and Instagram, but it will not include the social network’s news feed.
• With the pandemic disrupting the in-person networking, using Twitter to do so has become (at least, anecdotally) more popular.
• The return of TV’s two biggest inventory sources — the NFL and college football — has not been able to settle an unstable TV advertising market.
• After enduring a quarter of deeply discounted ad prices, a number of large publishers have begun testing out ways to increase their ad prices.
• National advertisers are eager to spend in communities that are starting to come out of lockdown — or in some cases have been out of lockdown for some time.