Brand Safety

Brand safety is an overall term for a variety of measures/controls designed to safeguard a brand’s image, reputation, and values when advertising online.

With many ad buying processes now automated, various brand safety measures/controls can be integrated into these processes to give brands the reassurance that their ads will not be delivered to pages containing undesirable or inappropriate content. Including measures/controls such as exclusion lists, viewability, ad fraud, and ad verification, brand safety is backed by a set of industry standards and benchmarks. The IAB Tech Lab identifies the following brand safety categories as “sensitive topics”:

• Adult & Explicit Sexual Content
• Arms & Ammunition
• Crime & Harmful Acts to Individuals and Society and Human Right Violations
• Death, Injury, or Military Conflict
• Online Piracy
• Hate Speech & Acts of Aggression
• Obscenity and Profanity
• Illegal Drugs/Tobacco/E-Cigarettes/Vaping/Alcohol
• Spam or Harmful Content
• Terrorism
• Sensitive Social Issues

This standardises the process of vendors and publishers categorising their content so that advertisers can decide whether it is brand safe for their advertisements.