Paid social

X (Twitter) unveils new features to boost control and safety for advertisers

X, formerly known as Twitter, has launched two new features to improve brand safety and control for advertisers.

Sensitivity Settings and Enhanced Blocklist will be rolled out for all customers over the next few weeks in the X Ads Manager.

Managing Director of X, Linda Yaccarino, said:

  • “This announcement completely reinforces our commitment to brand safety. X has built all its advertiser controls and third-party partnerships in just the last nine months. Thank you to our teams and our partners! More progress to come.”

Why we care. Ensuring your ad appears in the right place is important not only in terms of reach, but also for your brand’s reputation. If your ad appears alongside something inappropriate or a message that contradicts your brand’s beliefs and values, the damage could be hard to repair and impact sales.

What are Sensitivity Settings? This automated solution helps brands to find the right balance between reach and suitability, enabling them to select their preferred environment for ad placement. The tool uses machine learning to reduce adjacency to different types of content according to a brand’s sensitivity threshold.

What is an Enhanced Blocklist? This automated feature is designed to help protect advertisers from appearing next to unsafe keywords in the Home Timeline – for example ‘You’ and ‘Following’.

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What has X said? X announced the new features via an announcement on its blog. A spokesperson said:

  • “we are expanding our industry-leading partnerships and capabilities of Adjacency Controls to help all advertisers achieve their unique suitability needs in a more scaled and automated way. These new capabilities will work together to unlock an extended level of adjacency protection for X advertisers.”
  • “Our work is ongoing and these new solutions are important milestones in our continued brand safety and suitability efforts. X is committed to giving advertisers more control and transparency, and we’ll continue to keep building new capabilities for advertisers.”

Deep dive. Visit X’s blog to read its announcement in full to learn more.

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Brand safety Linda Yaccarino Machine learning Online advertising X
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About the author

Nicola Agius

Director of SEO and Discover, Reach PLC

Nicola Agius is the Director of SEo and Discover at Reach PLC. Previously, she was Paid Media Editor of Search Engine Land from 2023-2024. She covered paid media, retail media and more. Before this, she was SEO Director at Jungle Creations (2020-2023), overseeing the company's editorial strategy for multiple websites. She has over 15 years of experience in journalism and has previously worked at OK! Magazine (2010-2014), Mail Online (2014-2015), Mirror (2015-2017), Digital Spy (2017-2018) and The Sun (2018-2020). She also previously teamed up with SEO agency Blue Array to co-author Amazon bestselling book Mastering In-House SEO.