Zefr promises brand safety on TikTok with new AI offering

Brand suitability company Zefr announced it has partnered with TikTok to provide marketers with brand safety and brand suitability measurement for in-feed ads on the short-form video app. The product is available for TikTok advertisers in the U.S., Canada, U.K. and EU.

Using a patented Cognition AI machine learning engine, this new offering aims at providing independent, video-level verification of the content on TikTok that appears side-by-side with ads, giving marketers a better handle on the context surrounding ads. Zefr offers similar brand safety capabilities for advertisers on Facebook, as well as on YouTube.

The categories with which Zefr measures brand safety and suitability are aligned with those from the Global Alliance of Responsible Media (GARM). That means that insights and campaign analytics from Zefr map back to each of the 11 GARM categories.

Read more: Optimizing for TikTok with challenges and influencers

Zefr’s Cognition AI engine brings together audio, text and video frame-by-frame analysis, combined with human review and moderation from the Zefr team.

Why we care. The growth and scale of TikTok, which reached 1 billion active users in 2021, makes the platform an important channel that marketers can’t overlook. That same rapid growth also poses risks to brand safety and challenges to measurement with so many new users and content creators emerging on TikTok.

About The Author

Chris Wood

Chris Wood draws on over 15 years of reporting experience as a B2B editor and journalist. At DMN, he served as associate editor, offering original analysis on the evolving marketing tech landscape. He has interviewed leaders in tech and policy, from Canva CEO Melanie Perkins, to former Cisco CEO John Chambers, and Vivek Kundra, appointed by Barack Obama as the country's first federal CIO. He is especially interested in how new technologies, including voice and blockchain, are disrupting the marketing world as we know it. In 2019, he moderated a panel on "innovation theater" at Fintech Inn, in Vilnius. In addition to his marketing-focused reporting in industry trades like Robotics Trends, Modern Brewery Age and AdNation News, Wood has also written for KIRKUS, and contributes fiction, criticism and poetry to several leading book blogs. He studied English at Fairfield University, and was born in Springfield, Massachusetts. He lives in New York.