Brand Relevance is the Key to Brand Safe Content

Brand safety was born out of frustration. In its early days brand safety grew out of rampant fraudulent impressions and the fear that ads could appear next to violent, pornographic, or hateful content. Much has been done to address these two aspects of brand safety over the years, but new challenges appear as the ecosystem evolves.  Whether in how content/supply is derived, or in how various brand safety filters are created, the practice has become one of digital advertising’s murkiest and continuously confusing set of protocols. From overzealous blocklists to opaque AI/algorithms and separately defined notions of suitability - “safety” has too often meant playing it safe at the expense of opportunity.  In today’s current political environment, and the myriad voices (& responses), it has become devilishly difficult to choose content that steers clear of controversy.

As Meagan Myers of Fox Corporation explained to AdExchanger, many advertisers still treat brand safety as a blunt instrument. Nervous about negative associations, some brands prefer to block entire categories such as legitimate news that deals with difficult topics, rather than risk adjacency to controversy. The irony is that the same systems designed to protect brand reputation are now undermining it. Blocking methods often flag entirely harmless content, even celebratory obituaries, like Jane Goodall, or cooking tutorials, simply because they contain keywords like “death,” “knife,” or “breast.” When technology is limited in its ability to understand nuance, both publishers and advertisers lose.  AI and LLM’s have shown greater promise in this area, but dimensions of cost at the required scale has meant that some of these capabilities have forgone.

At the IAB’s Podcast Upfront, “The Breakfast Club” host Charlamagne Tha God put the issue in cultural terms: “You look at somebody and say they’re not necessarily safe… what does that mean?” His point echoes a broader criticism: that “brand safety” has drifted into endless subjectivity. That leaves us often excluding voices, audiences, and stories that don’t fit neatly into sanitized boxes. What began as a reputational guardrail has become tunnel vision, cutting ad dollars from where they should rightly be.

The industry’s future requires “continuous improvement” in defining suitable content for marketers to drive their businesses.  Stagwell’s Future of News initiative, which recently expanded to Asia-Pacific, is just one example of how the conversation is evolving. Instead of running away from news, advertisers are being encouraged to re-engage with it through data-driven suitability frameworks that consider tone, sentiment, and factual integrity. The next phase of brand safety protocols must move beyond current tools limitations and toward better contextual intelligence. That means transparency into the methods of how ad tech firms make placement decisions, and a willingness to embrace viable and safe environments. Beyond 2025, the safest brands will be those that understand, adapt, and contextualize the complexity of the real world - rather than relying on systems that aimlessly filter relevance out.