Brand safety in programmatic buying

Programmatic buying means buying ad slots without knowing in advance where they sit. That is the method's advantage and its risk.

Two terms that get confused

Brand safety means protection from harmful environments: violence, hate, disinformation, copyright infringement, adult content.

Brand suitability means whether an environment fits your particular brand. A report on an aircraft fault is not harmful, but it is unsuitable for an airline.

The first category is largely covered by standard settings. The second you must define yourself, and that rarely happens.

Using keyword blocking properly

The obvious solution is a keyword blocklist. It has two weaknesses.

First it blocks too much. The word "shot" blocks sports reports, "attack" blocks football, "dead" blocks "deadline". A carelessly built list removes the entire news section, which is exactly where attention is highest.

Second it blocks too little, because it does not grasp meaning. A piece can be problematic without containing a single listed word.

Practical rules: at most 100 to 200 terms, not several thousand; word combinations rather than single words where possible; review the list quarterly against the reach it actually blocked; and add semantic categories that assess content rather than count words.

The levels to set up

For most mid-sized advertisers levels 1 to 3 are compulsory and sufficient. Brands with high reputational exposure need level 4 or 5.

The emergency needs a plan

When an event makes your campaign unsuitable, response time is everything. Settle three things in advance: who decides, one named person with a deputy who may switch off without asking; how it is switched off, with credentials, an emergency procedure and a sales-house contact who answers at weekends; and which campaigns are affected, as a current list of all live bookings with contacts.

Businesses without those three take six to twelve hours to switch off in an emergency. With a plan it is twenty minutes.

The other side: blanket news exclusion

Many blocklists exclude news entirely. That is convenient and expensive twice over. Commercially you lose the environments with the highest attention and often the best viewability. Publicly, advertisers withdraw funding from journalism exactly where it matters most. A differentiated list that blocks individual events rather than whole sections is the better answer for both sides.