For much of its history, brand safety has been treated like a moat, a protective layer keeping bad content and bad optics at bay. But in 2025, that moat is no longer enough. Today, brand safety isn't just about protecting the brand from the world, it's about how the brand participates in the world and impacts consumers beyond the ad messages. This is especially true as AI, social platforms, and digital health converge to redefine what “safe,” “ethical,” and “trusted” mean in action.
Could it be that the appointment of former X (formerly Twitter) CEO Linda Yaccarino as CEO of eMed Population Health is a telling sign of where things are heading? eMed isn’t a media company, it’s a leader in digital-first health care. So why bring on a media executive? Yaccarino’s background and reach in the industry may be what's needed to make a healthcare approach more accessible, understandable, and culturally relevant to a media savvy and media saturated generation. This is brand safety as public trust infrastructure, where the integrity of messaging, transparency of data, and perceived humanity of a platform matter just as much as where an ad appears.
Historically, brand safety vendors served primarily as content gatekeepers. But now, with advertisers demanding ROI and reputation in equal measure, these legacy vendors are being pushed to evolve into full-stack signal/measurement providers. AI-first challengers are seizing the opportunity to outmaneuver older players by offering smarter, more predictive safety models… and brands are responding.
One of the clearest examples comes from Scope3, which recently announced its integration with Amazon DSP, the first of its kind to use Scope3’s Agentic Media Platform. Rather than blocking keywords or whole categories - blunt tools that often cause more harm than good, Scope3's new system allows advertisers to use custom-trained models that align with their values and campaign goals. Ideally this lets brands engage more responsibly without sacrificing reach and navigating nuance. This is a significant step forward. It acknowledges that values-driven targeting is the future - alignment is the key, not censorship.
The emerging need for integrity stands in stark contrast to the direction taken by platforms like X (formerly Twitter), where policy volatility and unchecked automation have driven away advertisers. In a world awash in artificiality, users are responding to authenticity with renewed urgency. They’re not just seeking truth, they're craving it.
Brands today can learn from this. You can’t build trust if your content, like much of today’s generative media, is engineered to approximate meaning rather than actually say something. The counterculture of the 1970s may have rejected the establishment, but it demanded authenticity. That demand hasn’t changed. If anything, it is much louder now. In 2025, safety isn’t the absence of harm, it’s the presence of responsibility.