Meta had announced several expanded brand safety and placement tools for its ads, an upgrade to help brands manage the display of their promotions across both Facebook and Instagram.

Meta made a first move by launching a live test of the ability to turn off comments on ads before it's released, giving greater control over how your promotional posts appear in the app.

Meta explained:

"We're aware that this functionality is helpful for brands when running sensitive campaigns or during times of heightened sensitivity."

Which is true, comment disabling can benefit your brand if it's in the news for all the wrong reasons, or the promotion is poorly timed, etc. But still, switching off comments can also be perceived as overly protective and even deceptive in some cases.

To be clear, you've been able to turn off comments on your Facebook and IG posts after they post for ages-this would just add the ability to turn them off before the campaign launches.

Really, most brands would probably like to keep comments open to maximize reach, and really, if you do need to turn off comments before your campaign is getting going, the fact that you're expecting negative remarks this far ahead of time strikes me as a bigger branding issue.

But the toggle is coming. Comment controls are already available "to a limited number of businesses," Meta says.

Meta is also introducing additional ad placement controls so brands can manage where their promotions appear in its apps.

"While last year we started to roll out the ability for businesses to run ads on Facebook and Instagram profiles, which is a great way for them to reach even more customers while they are intensely engaged.". To give businesses more control over which profiles their ads can appear on, we tested the ability for them to block their ads from appearing on certain Instagram profiles by applying a "publisher block list." Based on interest in this feature, we're expanding the control from Instagram to Facebook profile ads.

So now, brands will be able to specifically manage which user profiles their promotions are or are not displayed on within each app.

That could be helpful for avoiding problematic identities, or those who you don't feel are a good branding fit.

Meta says that businesses will be able to upload a list of any public profiles on which they don't want their ads to appear.

On the other side, Meta is also improving block lists - this time with Meta now supporting third-party-created block lists for brands working with Meta partners.
"It is all about providing businesses with the most choices and control around what's suitable for their brand, so they can choose exactly what's suitable for representation of their brand, and to directly work with Meta Business Partners to identify specifically which categories they may want to block. These decisions are made directly between businesses and their chosen Meta Business Partner because, in the end, it should be up to businesses to decide on their own suitability preferences. In early tests where pairing Meta's inventory filter for Feed and Reels with this third-party content block list is applied, businesses are seeing their brand suitability rate increase with this added layer of control."

So Meta will now permit businesses to implement third-party-created block lists, giving them more control over ad placements. That'll mean that Meta will honor listings created by approved partners so that if you're working with one of these groups and they have lists to exclude problematic placements, Meta will now facilitate that in its systems.

Meta says it is working with Integral Ad Science (IAS) as its first test partner on this project.

Finally, Meta is updating its Brand Safety and Suitability Center with enhanced listings that will better enable brands to control where and how their promotions are displayed.
The improved display will make it easier to manage each element of an advertiser's ad placement, and that again is going to give more control over how your promotions appear in Meta's apps.

So there are some extra control options for your Meta ads, which can further assist in making sure that your paid promotions are being shown how you like in each app. Of course, you do need to be cautious when implementing such features, but sometimes there may be some expansions that are helpful within these updates.