The digital advertising world is a veritable feast of options, like a crowded Thanksgiving table, & advertisers have more choices than ever. But, ensuring those choices don’t end up putting their brand next to something unappetizing is now a stale challenge. Fortunately, recent industry developments show that brands can avail themselves of smarter, more reliable ways to stay safe without giving up reach or performance.
Amazon’s recent announcement is a great example. Amazon DSP advertisers can now adjust brand suitability settings not just at the advertiser level, but also at the ad-group level via the API. This expansion applies to third-party web and mobile inventory for display and video. Features like the new “Brand Safety Tier Inherited Setting Details” and the ad-group-level “Brand Safety Tier Target” give advertisers finer control, meaning brands can tailor suitability more easily & confidently. Hopefully this adds up to what is more trusted, and less of what doesn’t suit a given brand.
The good news is this progress isn’t happening in isolation. AI is playing a growing role across the marketing ecosystem. How? By helping brands predict campaign performance, tailor content, detect fraud, and ensure ads fund environments that align with their values. Sentiment and contextual analysis have matured to the point where some AI tools can distinguish between genuinely harmful content and legitimate reporting. This is an area where, historically, blunt filters had created unnecessary blocking. The 2025 ANA findings underscore how far things have come: In the sample, 99.1% of programmatic ad spend occurred in low-risk environments, with a median brand risk of just 0.13%. Nearly half of all spend landed next to positive or neutral content, and only 1.56% appeared beside content judged to have a negative tone. Never perfect, but increasingly encouraging.
For advertisers, that’s something to be thankful for. The programmatic space has reached the point where scale & safety feel less like opposing forces, and technology is able to make less risky content choices. AI-powered brand safety tools, moderated by humans, allow advertisers to reach large audiences across the open web without accidentally choking off legitimate content pairings, like journalism, or over-restricting placement on blunt signals. The industry is maturing. The tools are getting smarter, and brands continue to have better control over where they’re seen.