Reddit Announces Brand Safety and Suitability Partnership With DoubleVerify

As a newly listed public entity, Reddit continues to expand its business foundations, including by announcing a partnership with digital analytics provider DoubleVerify to provide Brand Safety and Suitability measurement options for ad partners.

DoubleVerify, which provides third-party assurance for most social apps, will now be able to provide insight into Reddit ad placement, using the industry standard GARM framework for brand safety and suitability.

As per Reddit:

“Once DoubleVerify starts reporting on an advertiser’s activity, they can hone their Brand Safety and Suitability controls on Reddit based on the data they’re seeing. DoubleVerify provides detailed insights and incident reporting within DV Pinnacle®, their unified service and analytics platform, allowing brands to leverage keywords from post text and subreddits related to flagged posts within Negative Keyword Exclusions or Reddit Community Exclusions.”

The option will essentially provide more assurance for brands that their promotions are not being displayed next to offensive content in the app.

But then again, I’m not entirely sure about some of the metrics.

Within the announcement, Reddit notes that:

“Based on initial testing across a number of campaigns, >99% of impressions measured by D.V. appeared adjacent to content that was deemed safe.”

That is obviously a super high number, and super impressive for Reddit in this context. But DoubleVerify also recently reported that more than 99% of measured impressions on X also appeared “adjacent to content that was deemed safe in accordance with the GARM brand safety floor criteria.”

That’s despite many third-party reports suggesting that X’s ads are being shown alongside harmful content.

So where’s the discrepancy?

Well, the most significant issue would appear to be DoubleVerify’s methodology for reporting at platform level, which is seemingly not much more than a reflection of each app’s own reporting on brand safety.

As recently reported by Business Insider:

“Unlike on the open web, verifiers don't have a direct line of access to crawl the so-called walled gardens such as Meta, YouTube, and X. That leaves open the possibility that tech platforms can cherry-pick the data for the likes of DoubleVerify and Integral Ad Science to rubber stamp, experts have said.”

So, in effect, that 99% stat may not mean a heck of a lot, but DoubleVerify does offer confirmation of placement for specific campaigns, which is likely more indicative of actual performance.

I think. In all honestly, the complexities of this reporting are all a bit vague.

Like, this is how DoubleVerify explains its process:

“We use geometric methodology to validate viewability, supporting both IAB and custom brand-measurement thresholds. For mobile app environments, DV's solution leverages both certified MRAID and the Open Measurement SDK, enabling us to measure up to 95% of all eligible mobile inventory.”

Yeah, I’m not entirely sure what all of this means, but essentially, DoubleVerify will now be able to offer additional assurance that your ads are being displayed in safe environments on Reddit, within the limits of its reporting tools.

And that is valuable, and will help in protecting your brand, but I wouldn’t necessarily be taking that 99% figure as gospel.