What is brand safety?

Brand safety became an industry discipline when programmatic buying separated the ad from the placement decision: advertisers stopped choosing pages and started choosing audiences, and their ads followed those audiences into content nobody had vetted. High-profile adjacency scandals around extremist video content in 2017 made it a board-level topic, and the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) gave the industry a shared taxonomy of harm categories before winding down in 2024.

In practice, safety is enforced with category exclusions, keyword blocklists, and pre-bid verification vendors that score pages and videos before an impression is bought. The field has since split into two ideas: brand safety, the universal floor almost every advertiser shares, and brand suitability, the brand-specific judgment call. A beer brand and a children’s brand can reasonably disagree about a boxing match.

The classic pitfall is over-blocking. Blunt keyword lists have defunded quality journalism by blocking any page containing words like shooting or attack regardless of context, and they routinely exclude safe, relevant content while missing genuinely harmful placements that use no flagged words at all.

How this shows up in Waldo

Waldo is not an ad verification vendor and will not score placements. Where it helps is upstream: because it tracks the live conversation and content surrounding a brand across social platforms, teams notice early when the brand’s name starts showing up in contexts they would rather not be part of.

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