Reimagining brand safety beyond politics and posture

Mar 4

Brand safety has drifted into a strange place. What began as a practical concern - ensuring ads don’t appear next to genuinely harmful material - has become a sprawling apparatus of avoidance, control, over‑correction, and anxiety. We asked what would genuine brand safety look like if we removed politics and added finances into equation?

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Entire categories of human experience are treated as radioactive not because they pose real risk, but because the industry has lost the ability to distinguish harm from discomfort, context from controversy, safety from sanitisation.

If you strip politics out of the equation, the underlying problem becomes easier to discern.

Brand safety today is governed by a loose coalition - one might even call it a mafiosi - of platforms, vendors, agencies, and risk‑averse brands, none of whom are incentivised to build a coherent, human‑centred standard. The result is a system that protects brands from embarrassment rather than protecting people from harm. It is a safety regime built on fear of adjacency rather than clarity of consequence.

A more adult version of brand safety would start somewhere else entirely: with a grounded understanding of human risk, contextual integrity, and the real‑world consequences of information environments. It would treat safety as an ethical responsibility, not a compliance exercise. And it would require brands to articulate what they stand for, not simply what they want to avoid.

This is the shift the industry has resisted, because it demands accountability rather than defensiveness and a mature industry-wide conversation about the real problems.

The power vacuum at the heart of brand safety

The first step is acknowledging that no one truly governs brand safety. Platforms enforce their own opaque rules. Vendors sell taxonomies that reward over‑blocking. Agencies operationalise risk aversion. Brands outsource responsibility and then complain about the results. Creators bear the consequences.

This is not governance. It is a distributed anxiety system.

If brand safety is going to evolve, it needs a different organising principle—one that is not built on political categories or keyword lists, but on a clear understanding of harm, integrity, and context. That means distinguishing between reporting and glorification, identity and hate, civic discourse and destabilisation. It means recognising that news is not unsafe, that culture is not a liability, and that complexity is not a threat.

It also means accepting that safety is not the same as silence.

Brand safety minus politics

If we remove political dogma and adopt an investment mindset, brand safety becomes a discipline concerned with human wellbeing and contextual integrity. It focuses on:

deception, coercion, and manipulation
targeted harassment and dehumanisation
exploitation of vulnerable groups
glorification of violence or abuse
misinformation with real‑world consequences
environments that retraumatise or destabilise

These are not political categories. They are ethical ones.

This approach allows brands to appear next to civic discourse, identity conversations, cultural analysis, and responsible reporting—because the risk is no longer defined by topic but by conduct. It restores the possibility of participating in culture without being paralysed by it. It also creates space for creative ambition. When risk is priced rather than feared, brands can choose when to pursue growth, when to stabilise, and when to enter cultural terrain that actually matters. Safety becomes a function of clarity, not avoidance.

The real question: who defines harm?

Once you remove politics and adopt a consequence‑based, investor‑minded approach, the central question becomes unavoidable:

Who should define harm in a digital ecosystem that shapes public understanding, cultural meaning, and civic life?

Right now, the answer is: whoever is most afraid of being blamed - which is principally whoever stands to lose the most financially, whether it is through reputational damage or regulatory reprisal, or both.

Looking ahead, a coherent solution would involve platforms governing operational safety, brands governing value alignment, and independent bodies governing standards. It would involve transparency, auditability, and public‑interest oversight. It would treat safety as a shared responsibility, not a private preference.

This is the work the industry has avoided. But it is also the work that would allow brand safety to grow up.

What can brands do?

Act more like investors, not traders

In the essay The Robots Eating Our Energy we examined how widespread the problem of bad bots operating for bad actors has become. Since then internal memos from Meta examined by Reuters revealed estimates that its platforms show users 15 billion scam ads a day. Meta calculated that over $3 billion of the $18 billion in 2024 revenue from Chinese advertisers on the platform was coming from ads for scams, illegal gambling, pornography and other banned content.

Given the flimsiness of brand safety and opacity of measurement, this is likely the very tip of the iceberg.

Brands must first acknowledge that they are bankrolling a bankrupt system through their media spends - global advertising spend surpassed $1 trillion for the first time in 2025. Brands are collectively abdicating responsibility in the interest of narrow campaign metrics and benchmarks. If a rigerous framework existing for brand safety as we describe, this would be the basis from which to exert pressure.

A useful analogy comes from finance. Most marketing organisations behave like traders: reactive, volatility‑averse, and obsessed with short‑term signals. They treat campaigns as isolated bets and judge them against standardised metrics that flatten nuance and suppress ambition. This is how brand safety becomes a blunt instrument—anything that introduces uncertainty is treated as a threat.

But long‑term investors operate differently. They allocate capital according to risk appetite, time horizon, and strategic intent. They understand that different parts of a portfolio serve different purposes. They know that growth requires exposure, not insulation.

If we apply that logic to brand safety, the conversation changes.

An Adventurous media investment is not reckless. It is a deliberate choice to pursue higher variance because the potential upside is transformative. It demands more creative ambition, deeper narrative work, and a willingness to enter cultural terrain where meaning is actually produced. The risk is real, but so is the reward.

A Conservative media investment, by contrast, is stabilising. It prioritises efficiency and predictability. It keeps the baseline healthy, but it will not expand the frontier. The mistake is treating all campaigns as if they must behave like conservative assets, then labelling anything outside that narrow band as “unsafe”.

If brand safety were aligned with investment logic and a spectrum of risk profiles, the question would shift from “Is this content risky?” to “Does this level of risk match the strategic profile of the investment?” “Is our idea big enough to pursue the reward fully?” Safety becomes a matter of portfolio construction, not content avoidance. It forces brands to articulate their appetite for growth rather than hide behind compliance language.

In the end, the path forward is a blend of structural competence and strategic adulthood: brand safety needs a governance framework grounded in real‑world harm and financial discipline, and brands need the courage to act like investors—allocating risk intentionally, not avoiding it reflexively. When those two responsibilities meet, safety stops being theatre and becomes a system capable of supporting both human wellbeing and meaningful growth.

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Oliver Spalding