Brand Safety
Measures ensuring ads appear alongside appropriate, non-harmful content that aligns with brand values.
What is Brand Safety?
Brand safety refers to the practices and technologies that prevent advertisements from appearing alongside content that could damage the advertiser's brand reputation. Advertisers invest heavily in ensuring their ads don't appear next to harmful, offensive, controversial, or inappropriate content. This includes content categories like violence, hate speech, adult content, misinformation, piracy, and illegal activities.
Brand safety is enforced through a combination of pre-bid filtering (DSPs evaluate page content before bidding), post-bid verification (third-party tools like IAS, DoubleVerify, and MOAT scan pages after ads are served), and publisher blocklists (advertisers maintain lists of sites they won't advertise on).
Why It Matters for Publishers
Brand safety directly affects which advertisers are willing to bid on your inventory and how much they'll pay. Sites with strong brand safety scores attract premium advertisers (major consumer brands, financial services, healthcare) who pay significantly higher CPMs. Conversely, sites that are flagged for brand safety issues are blocked by these premium advertisers and left competing for lower-quality, lower-paying demand.
A single brand safety incident — an advertiser's ad appearing next to controversial content — can result in the advertiser blocking your entire domain. Once you're on major brand blocklists, recovering lost demand is extremely difficult and time-consuming.
Best Practices
- Establish content guidelines: Create and enforce editorial guidelines that keep your content within brand-safe boundaries. Avoid publishing content in categories that advertisers commonly block.
- Use content categorization: Properly categorize your pages using IAB content taxonomy. This helps DSPs and verification tools accurately assess your content and match appropriate ads.
- Monitor user-generated content: If your site has comments, forums, or user submissions, moderate them actively. Unmoderated user content is a common source of brand safety issues.
- Block problematic ad categories: Use your ad server's competitive exclusions and category blocking to prevent ads for products or services that don't align with your audience (gambling, adult products, etc.).
- Get brand safety certified: Work with verification partners to obtain brand safety certifications. This gives advertisers confidence in your inventory and can unlock premium demand.