Digital marketing presents an unprecedented opportunity to build awareness, engagement and grow. It also opens the door to unprecedented risk to a brand’s hard-earned reputation. More than three quarters of consumers say they’d lose trust in a brand if they saw its ad alongside inappropriate content.
Brand safety is under threat in 2025, but proactive marketers can set up strong human and digital defence lines to keep brand reputations intact.
With the rise of programmatic advertising and the key benefits it brings – vastly expanded reach, more precise targeting, cost savings and access to real-time data – it is easy to inadvertently place ads alongside inappropriate content that misleads, offends and, in worst case scenarios, causes harm. Damaging content can be racist or sexist, or may even promote illegal activity. Social media platform Twitter (now X) revealed in 2022 that it had mistakenly run ads on profiles linked to child sex abuse.
Reliance on automated platforms isn’t the only risk to brand reputation. The growing use of artificial intelligence (AI) to generate advertising and social media content offers important efficiencies, but without proper oversight and context, brands may be forced to do damage control.
Simply put, digital marketing presents an unprecedented opportunity to build awareness, engagement and grow. It also opens the door to unprecedented risk to a brand’s hard-earned reputation. More than three quarters of consumers say they’d lose trust in a brand if they saw its ad alongside inappropriate content.
With stakes this high, it’s up to digital marketers to build and integrate a comprehensive brand safety strategy into their overarching digital marketing strategy.
The Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) UK defines brand safety as “the measures and strategies used to ensure that online advertisements do not appear in contexts that could be harmful to a brand's reputation. This typically involves preventing ads from being placed alongside content that is inappropriate, offensive, misleading, or controversial, which might negatively affect how the brand is perceived by consumers.”
While avoiding content or context that can harm a brand is critical, in today’s environment, it’s just as important to ensure brand advertising also avoids content that does not share a brand’s values or align with its purpose. More than this, brands should curate their digital presence to enhance their reputation by ensuring their ads appear near content that aligns with their values, mission and vision. This is called brand suitability, and it requires a more sophisticated approach based on a clear understanding of a brand’s raison d’etre, context and audience expectations.
Together, brand safety and brand suitability can help ensure your online presence reflects the real you and what you’re all about.
Fast fact: A study by Global digital advertising platform GumGum found that 20 per cent of all video-streaming ad breaks targeted at children contained at least one inappropriate ad, including ads for alcohol, casinos, gambling, adult hygiene, pharmaceuticals and foods with high sugar/fat content.
Building a comprehensive brand safety strategy for programmatic campaigns starts with a clear understanding of your brand and defining safety guidelines. While marketing takes the lead, ensuring the strategy reflects your brand voice and values and that campaigns drive the results you want is a team effort. It should include input from across your organization:
Identify, record and share a detailed list of topics, keywords and phrases that could hurt your brand reputation and use keyword filters to prevent ads from showing up on pages containing these words and phrases. Create an exclusion list for websites and mobile app categories where you absolutely do not want your ads to appear. Classify content by risk level: low, moderate or high risk. Base this categorization both on the image of your brand you want to curate and the expectations of your target audience. Implement ad placement controls to protect your brand’s reputation.
Leverage high tech and high touch
Ad verification platforms scan web pages and app content for potential brand safety threats in real time. Contextual analysis tools can understand sentiment and context beyond keywords. Social listening platforms can track mentions, conversations and sentiment around your brand. For highly nuanced or sensitive campaigns, implement a human review process.
Tip: Implement the brand safety features offered by social media platforms. For example:
Establish dashboards to monitor ad placements and identify potential brand safety issues in real time. Regularly review and adjust your exclusion lists as new trends and content categories emerge. Use data analysis to spot high-risk sites and placements, and make the appropriate changes.
Be discerning when selecting demand-side platforms. Ensure your partner has sophisticated brand safety controls that can integrate with the third-party verification tools you are using. Be just as discerning when collaborating with publishers. Clearly state your brand safety guidelines and make sure they follow your standards and are aligned with your brand values and voice.
In today’s fast-moving digital world, it is just good business to have a response plan in place to mitigate unexpected crises. Outline clear actions, messaging and criteria for pausing programmatic ad campaigns. Make sure team members know the strategy and are ready to execute, if and when necessary.
Make sure employees have a clear understanding of your brand safety guidelines to ensure they are engaging with your audience in a way that reflects your brand values and does not pose risks to your brand reputation. Implement regular reviews to make sure everyone is up to date on the latest digital threats and trends.
Comprehensive safety guidelines can help ensure your brand avoids negative associations and builds a positive audience perception, ensuring you reap the benefits of programmatic advertising while mitigating risk.
