Facebook Restricts Some Ad Placement to Protect Brand Reputation

In an effort to help advertisers protect their brands, Facebook bid adieu to free-for-all ad placement in groups and pages that might compromise the advertiser's image. Facebook has begun a new review process for ads.

"This process will expand the scope of Pages and Groups that should be ad-restricted. By the end of the week, we will remove ads from all Pages and Groups that fall into this new, more expansive restricted list.

For example, we will now seek to restrict ads from appearing next to Pages and Groups that contain any violent, graphic or sexual content (content that does not violate our community standards).

Prior to this change, a Page selling adult products was eligible to have ads appear on its right-hand side; now there will not be ads displayed next to this type of content."

Facebook said the review will be manual at first, with a more automated process in the future. So, why the sudden change? Facebook made it clear that while these changes "won't have a meaningful impact on Facebook's business, they will result in benefits to people and marketers."

Its blog post read more like an apology than anything else. This is likely due to what we know about significant advertisers suspending their accounts when their ads were shown alongside content the brands didn't like, according to BBC.

"Like any digital platform, we're not going to be perfect but we will be much better," Facebook said. "We'll continue to work aggressively on this issue with advertisers. We are confident the immediate steps we're taking will result in a significantly improved approach to preventing these instances from occurring, and we are committed to making this process work for everyone who uses Facebook."