Brand marketers shun emerging social platforms over UGC risk

Industry Contributor 6 May 2019 - 2 min read

Brand marketers shun emerging social platforms over UGC risk

By Paul McIntyre - Executive Editor

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Tags: social media, brand marketing, performance marketing, reddit, TikTok, Facebook, Youtube, brand safety, UGC

Brand marketers are avoiding emerging social platforms like TikTok and Reddit, but performance marketers are less concerned about brand safety in user generated content environments, according to a survey of 94 client-side marketers (Digiday).

Key points:

Survey found 38% avoid TikTok; 34% Reddit; 22% Snapchat; 21% Twitch
Despite ongoing safety issues, only 12 per cent expressed similar concerns about YouTube
Almost half (46%) do not avoid UGC platforms over brand safety issues
Reddit can work well for niche communities, but "a hard place to run a branding campaign because the content is so unpredictable" - Andrew Sandoval, director of biddable media, The Media Kitchen
Facebook's hiring of content mods mean other platforms must take similar steps to attract spend
Reddit has hired "anti evil" team to tackle hate speech, plus other safety tools in bid to woo advertisers

YouTube seems to getting away with it. Facebook too, though both are investing to combat fake news, funding terrorism, hate speech, paedophilia, live massacres etc. Despite short-term principled stands from some big marketers, their scale and cheap reach - afforded by monetising user generated content - are hard habits to kick.

Reddit, part of the Advance Publications stable that owns The Discovery Channel, Condé Nast and Wired, has worked to clean up the platform's darker recesses for some years, with varying degrees of success. Digiday’s survey suggests it may need to invest further in sanitisation measures to woo brands – particularly if the 14-year old site, now the sixth largest in the U.S., is still viewed as 'emerging' and potentially unsafe for branding campaigns.

TikTok's meteoric rise leaves marketers still feeling their way. 500 million active users generating video is a big market – but the Chinese-owned firm has faced bans around the world for dark content. Yet six in ten marketers appear comfortable they can manage the inherent risk posed by the platform's operating model.

For a comprehensive breakdown of latest social media platform numbers and performance, this article from The Next Web is worth a read.