Digital Marketers Are Reportedly Seeking Influencer Whitelists To Ensure Brand Safety

In light of the YouTube Adpocalypse, and given the risks that brands inevitably take in partnering with online influencers — who are bound to make off-color comments given the glut of content that they share about their lives each day — many top advertisers today are beginning to seek influencer whitelists in order to better ensure brand safety.

Whitelists, or pre-approved rosters of creators that brands feel they can work with risk-free, are less scalable and more expensive to compile than blacklists, according to Digiday — though recent developments may have made them necessary. Whereas in the past, brands might team with thousands of influencers on a campaign, giving them a fair amount of freedom to make posts as they saw fit, certain highly sponsored influencers have found themselves in hot water in recent months. Felix ‘PewDiePie’ Kjellberg, for instance, was dropped by Disney

and YouTube for making anti-Semitic jokes, while CoverGirl’s first male spokesmodel, James Charles, ignited a firestorm with a tone deaf joke about Africa.

In addition to categorizing brand-friendly influencers, according to Digiday, the whitelists being developed by influencer marketing firms also help brands to avoid partnerships with creators who have worked with competitors.

Influencer marketing agency Little Bird has a whitelist system that it used to help Microsoft execute a Skype campaign, while Hashoff, another influencer marketing platform, offers a whitelist that is based on a list by Google of 1,000 terms in the English language that have been deemed inappropriate.

For more, check out Digiday’s report in full right here.