Brand safety
Brand safety is keeping your ads off pages and videos that would hurt the brand by sitting next to them, such as violence, hate, explicit material, or crisis news. Brand suitability is the stricter, brand-specific version of the same idea. A control that is too tight will also hide you from good pages.
Theodor Lindfors, Founding Marketer ·
What brand safety actually covers
Let's take a drink brand as an example. They sell a low-sugar sports drink for active women over 50, mostly from their own website. Typical ads run on Meta, TikTok, and YouTube, and some budget also buys display and video across the open web. Brand safety is the work of keeping that bottle away from pages and videos that would make a customer flinch.
The common brand-safety categories are adult content, arms, crime, death and injury, hate speech, illegal drugs, obscenity, terrorism, and sensitive social issues. Most verification vendors publish their own taxonomy, and each one draws the lines slightly differently. Crisis news is the case that catches teams out. Let's take a drink brand as an example. They sell a low-sugar sports drink for active women over 50, mostly from their own website. A campaign that was fine on Monday can appear next to a breaking tragedy on Tuesday. That needs a live process, not a list written last quarter.
How it gets enforced
Pre-bid controls stop a drink brand's bid before it happens, based on the page, the app, or the content signal in the request. Post-bid controls block the creative from rendering, or report the impression after the fact. Pre-bid protects the budget. Post-bid mostly protects the reporting. Let's take a drink brand as an example. They sell a low-sugar sports drink for active women over 50, mostly from their own website. If the brand only blocks after the ad served, it still paid for the impression next to the crash video.
Inclusion lists are the blunt but effective option: name the sites and apps you accept, and ignore everything else. A PMP (private marketplace: an invitation-only auction) achieves the same thing through a negotiated deal. Let's take a drink brand as an example. They sell a low-sugar sports drink for active women over 50, mostly from their own website. The brand might allow a short list of health and outdoor publishers rather than trying to block the entire internet by keyword.
The cost of overblocking
Aggressive keyword blocklists routinely defund legitimate journalism and shrink the reachable audience to a handful of expensive sites. Blocking a word like shot removes vaccine coverage and sports reporting alongside the content a drink brand meant to avoid. Blocking diet can hide the drink brand from the exact health articles its customers read.
Overblocking also drives up the effective price. Fewer eligible impressions means more competition for what remains, which shows up as a rising eCPM (effective cost per thousand impressions) with no change in campaign quality. Let's take a drink brand as an example. They sell a low-sugar sports drink for active women over 50, mostly from their own website. The brand then pays more to reach fewer people, and the report looks like a media problem instead of a list problem.
Common brand safety mistakes
- Copying a generic blocklist onto a drink brand and never reviewing what it actually removed.
- Relying on post-bid blocking and still paying for the impression next to the content you hate.
- Treating suitability as the verification vendor's decision rather than the drink brand's.
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