Brand Safety: How to Keep Your Ads and Sponsorships Away From Harmful Content

Brand safety is the practice of keeping your advertising, sponsorships and partnerships away from content that could harm your reputation, such as hate speech, violence, misinformation, adult material or illegal activity. In practice it means controlling where your ads run, which channels and publishers you exclude, and which creators and events you attach your name to. The goal is simple: nobody should see your logo next to something that makes them trust you less.

This guide covers how unsafe placements happen, the controls you have on ad platforms, how to vet influencers and sponsorships, and how brand safety differs from brand suitability. It is written for small and mid-sized businesses running their own ads, not just large advertisers with agencies.

Why brand safety is a reputation issue

Most people don’t know how programmatic advertising works. When they see an ad for a family restaurant beside a video full of slurs, they don’t think “an algorithm matched keywords”. They think the restaurant paid to be there, or at least didn’t care.

A single screenshot of that pairing can travel much further than the ad itself. The same applies to sponsorships: if you sponsor a podcast and the host says something offensive, your name is in the credits of that episode. Brand safety sits beside the other items in your reputation risk register because the damage looks the same as any other lapse in judgment, even when the cause was automated.

There is also a money angle. Spend that lands on low-quality or harmful sites usually performs poorly, so poor brand safety tends to waste budget as well as trust.

How ads end up next to harmful content

Very few businesses choose a harmful placement on purpose. It usually happens through one of these routes:

• Automated placement. Display networks, video platforms and programmatic exchanges place ads across a huge range of sites and channels based on audience signals. If you target an audience rather than specific sites, your ad follows that audience wherever it goes.
• Broad keyword or topic matching. A news article about a tragedy can contain the same words as your product category. Contextual targeting without exclusions can place a travel ad beside a story about a plane crash.
• Social feeds. In a feed, your ad appears between posts from other users. You can’t see or approve those neighbors, though platforms offer some controls over the inventory types you run on.
• Made-for-advertising sites. Low-quality sites built mainly to show ads can pass basic checks and still carry scraped, misleading or offensive content.
• Partner behavior. An influencer, athlete, event or publisher you sponsor can say or do something that becomes a story, and your brand gets pulled into it.

Brand safety vs brand suitability

The two terms are often used together, but they mean different things, and the difference affects how you set your controls.

	Brand safety	Brand suitability
Question it answers	Is this content harmful for any advertiser?	Is this content right for our brand specifically?
Examples	Hate speech, terrorism, child exploitation, illegal drugs, graphic violence	Alcohol content for a children’s brand, crime news for a home security firm, profanity-heavy comedy for a bank
Who sets the line	Largely shared across the industry and platform policies	You, based on your audience, values and category
Typical control	Hard exclusions that never change	Adjustable tiers, topic filters and case-by-case judgment

Advertising industry groups have published shared definitions of harmful content categories and ways to grade risk within them, and many platforms and verification vendors build their settings around similar ideas. You don’t need to adopt any one framework in full. What matters is that you decide which categories are never acceptable (safety) and which depend on context (suitability).

Suitability is where most real decisions happen. Blocking all news content, for example, is safe but blunt: it removes you from a lot of legitimate, high-quality journalism. Many advertisers now prefer to exclude specific sensitive topics rather than whole categories of content.

How to set up brand safety on your ad accounts

Every major ad platform has its own settings and names for them, and those change often, so treat the steps below as a checklist of what to look for rather than exact menu paths.

1. Write down your red lines. List the content categories you will never appear next to, then list the sensitive topics that depend on context. Keep it to one page so the people running ads can actually use it.
2. Choose an inventory or sensitivity setting. Most large platforms let you pick how much sensitive content your ads can appear alongside, typically from a restrictive tier to an expanded one. Start restrictive and loosen only with a reason.
3. Build exclusion lists. Add specific sites, apps, channels and videos you don’t want to run on. Many platforms also let you exclude content labels, topics or keywords. Maintain one master list and apply it to every campaign.
4. Consider an inclusion list for sensitive campaigns. For launches or campaigns in a delicate category, running only on a hand-picked list of publishers gives you more control, at the cost of reach.
5. Review placement reports regularly. Most platforms show where your ads actually ran. Check them monthly and add anything unsuitable to your exclusion list.
6. Use keyword exclusions carefully. Blocking words like “crash” or “shooting” can also block harmless content, such as a photography blog or a car review. Review what your keyword list removes before adding more terms.
7. Decide on third-party verification. Larger advertisers often use independent verification tools that score pages and report on where ads ran. For a small budget, platform controls plus regular placement reviews are usually enough.

Vetting influencers, creators and sponsorships

Platform settings can’t protect you from a partner’s own words. For people and events, brand safety is a matter of due diligence before you sign and clear terms after.

Before you agree to work together

• Review their history. Scroll back through a creator’s posts, videos and comments over several years, not just the recent highlights. Search their name with terms like “controversy”, “apology” and “scam”.
• Look at their audience, not just follower counts. Read the comment sections. The tone of a community tells you a lot about what your brand will be associated with.
• Check past partnerships. Who else have they worked with, and did they disclose those partnerships clearly? A creator who ignores disclosure rules puts you at risk with the FTC. Our guide to FTC influencer guidelines explains what proper disclosure looks like.
• For events and sponsorships, look at the other sponsors, the organizer’s history, and any recent news coverage.

In the agreement

• Content approval rights for sponsored posts, or at least a review window.
• A clear disclosure requirement.
• A morals or conduct clause that lets either side end the relationship after serious misconduct. Talk to a lawyer about the wording.
• An agreed process for what happens if something goes wrong, including who comments publicly and when.

If a partner does become the story, the response is a crisis communication decision, not a settings change. Our guide to handling an influencer controversy walks through that decision.

A worked example: a regional bank’s video ads

Here is an illustrative scenario, not a real client. A regional bank runs video ads to promote a new savings account, targeting adults aged 25 to 45 across a large video platform. A customer emails a screenshot: the ad played before a video promoting a get-rich-quick crypto scheme.

The bank’s marketing lead works through the problem in order:

1. Pulls the placement report and finds the ad ran on several dozen channels about speculative trading and “financial secrets”, plus a handful of conspiracy channels.
2. Excludes those channels, adds topic exclusions for gambling and speculative finance, and moves the campaign to a more restrictive inventory setting.
3. Writes a short suitability note: news and personal finance education are fine, content promising sure-fire returns is not.
4. Replies to the customer, thanks them, explains that the placement was automated and has been blocked, and doesn’t argue.
5. Sets a monthly placement review on the calendar.

Reach drops a little. Cost per new account stays roughly the same, because the excluded placements were rarely converting anyway. The bank now has a written policy it can hand to any agency it hires.

Monitoring and responding when something slips through

No set of controls is perfect. What protects your reputation is how quickly you notice a problem and how you respond.

• Watch for mentions of your ads. People often post screenshots with your brand name or handle. Tracking brand mentions across social media helps you see these early.
• Pause first, investigate second. If a placement is clearly harmful, pause the affected campaign or placement immediately, then find out how it happened.
• Reply plainly. A short public reply is usually enough:

Thanks for flagging this. We didn’t choose that placement, and we don’t want our ads anywhere near that content. We’ve blocked it and we’re reviewing our settings so it doesn’t happen again.

• Fix the settings, not just the one site. A single bad placement usually points to a gap in your exclusions or sensitivity tier.

Common brand safety mistakes

• Relying on default settings. Defaults are designed for reach. They are rarely your own suitability choices.
• Setting controls once and forgetting them. New channels, sites and topics appear constantly. Exclusion lists need regular upkeep.
• Over-blocking. Huge keyword blocklists can cut you off from legitimate news and quality publishers, and can end up excluding coverage of communities you want to reach.
• Ignoring partners. Businesses often spend hours on ad settings and minutes on vetting the creator whose face will carry their brand.
• Treating it as purely a media task. Brand safety decisions reflect your values. Someone senior should approve the red lines.

When it’s worth getting help

If you run a modest ad budget on one or two platforms, you can manage brand safety yourself with a written policy, exclusion lists and a monthly placement review. Outside help is worth considering when you advertise across many channels, work with many creators, or have already had a placement turn into a public complaint. Our reputation monitoring service watches for mentions of your business across search, reviews and social media, so a problem screenshot is spotted early rather than weeks later.

Frequently asked questions

What does brand safety mean in advertising?

It means making sure your ads don’t appear next to content that is harmful or offensive, such as hate speech, graphic violence, illegal activity or misinformation. It also extends to the creators, publishers and events you sponsor or partner with.

What is the difference between brand safety and brand suitability?

Brand safety covers content that is unacceptable for almost any advertiser. Brand suitability is about what fits your particular brand: content that is fine for one business, such as alcohol or crime reporting, may be wrong for another. Safety is a fixed floor; suitability is a set of choices you make.

Can I completely prevent my ads from appearing next to bad content?

Not completely, especially on automated networks and social feeds. You can reduce the risk a great deal with restrictive settings, exclusion lists, inclusion lists for sensitive campaigns and regular placement reviews, and you can respond quickly when something slips through.

Is brand safety only a concern for big advertisers?

No. Small businesses often have less margin for a public embarrassment, and a screenshot of a local brand’s ad beside offensive content can spread quickly in a community. The controls are available on most ad platforms at no extra cost.