Trust is Driven by Better Context and Platform Accountability

Brand safety quickly became an industry-wide focal point, almost overnight in 2016, as major brands grappled with the real and increasingly concerning impact of their ads running alongside objectionable content, particularly on YouTube. What began as a targeted response to the volatility of user-generated social platforms quickly hardened into a fairly rigid default risk posture across digital advertising - keyword blocking. In a reactionary stance, keyword blocking was deployed quickly, and across the ecosystem. Over time these blunt instruments, lacking nuance, expanded beyond social feeds and into the open web, sweeping up professionally produced journalism and credible news content simply because it referenced the touchy topics of politics, health, or social justice. This imbalance was responsible for trusted publishers losing revenue and impact, while social platforms continued to command ad dollars due to their scale and pricing - making advertisers feel that they could not forgo the lucrative ad placements.

That imbalance now sits at the center of broader legal tensions in the ad ecosystem; advertisers have recently pushed to dismiss X’s lawsuit. The lawsuit primarily focuses on an alleged coordinated boycott by major marketers, who in turn, assert that brands are not obligated to spend ad dollars in environments they believe degrade quality of their brand communications or increase reputational risk. Advertisers argue that pulling budgets from a platform is not collusion, but a rational business decision when safety, suitability, or governance standards erode. The fact the so many have done so should highlight that the platform has a governance problem. The case demonstrates how brand safety has evolved beyond adjacency concerns and has grown into a broader consideration of platform trust, accountability, and long-term value.

In present day efforts, publishers and technology providers are actively working to correct the overreach of early brand safety approaches at the content level. Nine’s renewed partnership with Mantis illustrates how contextual and AI-driven approaches can significantly restore the context of nuance, lost to rigid blocklists by evaluating content based on editorial intent rather than isolated keywords. Through the partnership, Nine has more than doubled its brand-safe inventory, protecting advertisers from genuinely unsafe environments. This success points to a more sophisticated phase of brand safety. One that prioritizes higher precision over exclusion, and recognizes that not all sensitive topics are inherently unsafe when filtered responsibly.

At the same time, social platforms are entering new monetization phases that will further test brand safety frameworks. Meta’s global rollout of ads on Threads, reflects both opportunity and risk. As new environments scale quickly, brands will once again face familiar questions: how is content moderated, how are ads placed, and whether the development of safeguards can keep pace.