There is no single solution for brand safety, experts warn

Despite The Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) shutting down in dramatic fashion earlier this month, brand safety remains a top concern for marketers.

While there has been discussion about who will fill the vacuum left by GARM to lead on brand safety standards, experts say the organisation’s approach—creating universal brand-safe environments through independent group discussions and standardised measurements—wasn’t a perfect solution for all brands. 

“It’s necessary for certain brands that are in really sensitive categories, but there's a tax applied to it by a lot of firms that sell that inventory or apply those brand safety standards,” said Danny Weisman, head of planning at media agency Noble People. “That makes it really hard for smaller brands or brands with limited budgets to account for those things and still drive the results they want.” 

GARM shut down on August 9, two days after Elon Musk’s X filed an antitrust lawsuit against the group and a few of its prominent members for alleged collusion to withhold advertising dollars from the platform. 

The nonprofit group, part of the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), created the Brand Safety Floor and the Adjacency Standards Framework, which help marketers ensure their ads don’t appear next to illegal or malicious content. The group claimed to have helped reduce harmful ads from 6.1% of total ads in 2020 to 1.7% in 2023. 

Though industry players were sad to see GARM give into Musk’s bullying tactics, volunteer coalitions like GARM don’t really hold any power to make any meaningful changes, said Jeff Matisoff, partner at Jellyfish. When it comes to brand safety, brands need to decide what they have an appetite for on a case-by-case basis. 

“They are going to continue to make decisions based on what's performing for their actual measurable business, what their strategy for the future is, and where they believe and want to get their brand to appear,” he said. “Any group, not just GARM, can help and advocate for that. But at the end of the day, the dollars are going to be what matters.” 

Furthermore, “certified” brand safe environments come at a price that may not pay off for some clients, Weisman said, adding that brand safety is turning into a profit margin for digital advertising platforms.

“There are firms out there that will deploy your media dollars for you with certain brand safety standards, but it's double the CPM, or it's 25% to 30% higher,” he explained. “A lot of brands just don't do it, because that means less hard-working media or media dollars in market that are driving results.”

Another issue with the current approach to brand safety is that the news cycle changes constantly, making catching brand snafus preemptively ever more challenging. For instance, an influencer who was considered brand-safe could be later canceled for associations outside of their control, Captiv8 co-founder Krishna Subramanian said. And while current brand safety tech can be leveraged for historical context, it can be hard to audit things in real-time.

“There needs to be a way to have conversations, allow people to have different viewpoints, collaborate with best practices and just push for higher standards—and I'm not sure exactly what that type of organisation looks like,” he said.

Meanwhile, the topic of brand safety is being used as a scapegoat to direct ad dollars to other places. While Musk claims that various advertiser boycotts of X are due to perceived brand safety issues, in reality, X (and Twitter) never performed well as direct response channels, Weisman said. Plus, ad budgets were being cut at the time of those boycotts regardless because of fears of an impending recession.

“It was almost [like] the brand safety argument was air cover for a lot of brands to pull back from a platform they thought wasn't working hard enough for them anyway,” he added. 

Where brand safety goes from here

Standardised digital solutions and strict rules aren’t the end-all-be-all approach to brand safety. Individualised solutions with constant human and automated monitoring may be the key. 

Jellyfish takes this approach, building bespoke brand safe inventory packages based on client needs.

“Technology helps, but you also need the people to be vetting it to make sure that as new sites come online, as new platforms and things change, that you're staying up speed with what your brand wants to do,” Matisoff said.

Similarly, a direct understanding of who the brand is working with is important. In the case of influencers, marketers need to find people whose values align with their company, Subramanian said. There’s no singular standard that can determine that without taking things out of context.

“It really comes down to looking at that specific audience or that specific influencer,” he said. “How does their content and presence really align to the brand's core values? Just having a certain point of view or bold opinions on things doesn't mean you should stay away from them.” 

A community solution or independent group could help, but it needs to include representatives from all sides of the industry, Subramanian added.

At the end of the day, brand safety will require direct partnership between brands and ad platforms to ensure that it is taken seriously, Weisman said. As brands band together to push for safe environments and threaten to boycott unsafe ones, platforms will be incentivised to create cost-effective solutions—that are worth the higher CPMs. 

“Brands need to take a stand and just decide for themselves,” Weisman said. “Do they want to be in partnership with platforms that don't prioritise brand safety and prioritise illegitimate content or unscrupulous content or unsafe content? Or do they just want to drive business results? I see them right now as mutually exclusive.”