The Brand Safety Institute (BSI) and the Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG) released the second in a series of joint white papers on brand safety issues, “Defining Brand Safety: Execution Challenges.” The white paper found that investment in brand safety initiatives resulted in a positive ROI for some marketers who tracked that cost, while brands’ increased focus on brand safety strategy enabled greater, more transparent collaboration with their agency partners. The paper is also the first to quantify brand safety investment, finding that large agency holding companies are currently spending between $3-7 million annually on fixed-cost brand safety expenses.

Brand Safety is a term that has exploded over the last few years in its use, and misuse, to describe topics in digital advertising. In various industry meetings, articles and opinion pieces, Brand Safety has been used to describe everything from ad fraud, viewability, user experience, and adjacency or placement in contextually appropriate environments. While these appear to be mostly B2B related issues in the digital advertising supply chain, one agency executive interviewed depicted the challenge: