Getting Started with Brand Safety

Misinformation, political conflict, and war across the news and social media have made brand safety a larger concern than ever for marketers. When it comes to programmatic, what options are available to advertisers who want to minimize exposure to explicit or controversial content?

There are many ways digital campaign managers can exert greater control over where their ads are running. When running regular display and pre-roll campaigns, top-tier brand safety is often provided by a DPS’s 3rd-party partners. These solutions offer real-time blocking across a variety of topics, publishers, maturity-levels, and even languages in order to prevent impressions on certain types of inventory.

Brand safety options aren’t available for every campaign though. Audio and CTV inventory in particular tends to be newer and more “dynamic” in content, often lacking the contextual tags that are used to categorize and grade subject matter. Even so, tools and techniques like device type targeting, manual blocklisting, and PMPs (private marketplace deals) offer a reliable substitute.