How AI is shaping the next generation of brand safety and suitability

It’s important that brands show up in media environments that reflect their values. That starts with understanding what brand safety and suitability really mean.

Brand safety and suitability is fairly simple on paper.

• Brand safety refers to the process of blocking all the content that could be dangerous for any brand to advertise next to (terrorism, pornography, etc.)
• Brand suitability refers to the process of blocking content that specific brands would want to avoid because it doesn’t align with their values, and pursuing content that they want to appear next to.

For example, imagine a children’s clothing brand that wants its ads to reach new parents to drive more sales. It would implement brand safety standards that keep it from advertising on content that could be offensive to its target audience (say, explicit or violent content). It would also implement brand suitability guidelines to help it appear in places that are contextually relevant to the brand (for example, an online parenting magazine).

Unfortunately, in practice, solving for brand safety is extremely complex for a number of reasons.

There is no one-size-fits-all approach, as every brand is different and has its own set of values, principles, and standards. Simply determining the safe and suitable advertising opportunities for a single brand is a difficult task that involves both a sophisticated analysis of content as well as a deep understanding of a brand’s unique needs. Solving for brand safety and suitability at scale, then, requires highly adept technology that, until recently, has not existed.

Fortunately, AI excels in the tasks that have made brand safety and suitability a hard nut to crack as content becomes more dynamic, fragmented, and fast-moving.

The problem with current brand safety solutions

Brand safety is typically managed through keywords and block lists, where brands exclude content containing unsafe terms (e.g., violence, politics, adult content, or hate speech). Block lists, based on content categories, help brands avoid certain environments. Some advertisers may block all news to steer clear of political or violent stories, while others aim to avoid only low-quality journalism, preferring reputable outlets.

These solutions to brand safety are overly broad and rely too heavily on out-of-context signals from publishers. Consider an advertiser who wants to avoid violent content and blocks the word “war.” They may have unintentionally blocked content that could very well be brand safe (like a review of Marvel’s Avengers: Infinity War) simply because the tools they used didn’t account for context.

The problem with current brand suitability solutions

Brand suitability is most commonly solved with content taxonomies, which help brands narrow down where to find their audience (think: a brand who wants to target small business owners might seek out content on entrepreneurship and growing businesses).

Content taxonomies fall short as a brand suitability solution because they attempt to map the immense complexity of a brand’s values into categories.

How AI is poised to simplify brand safety and suitability to the benefit of brands and publishers

AI is uniquely suited to take on the complexity of brand safety and suitability. It excels at analyzing content and semantics in full context, at scale, with far more precision than traditional tools. And because it operates according to consistent logic, AI also brings reliability across markets, channels, and teams.

Just as important: AI doesn’t replace human judgment. When brands train their own agentic models, they retain full control over what their standards look like and how they’re applied. That means more time to focus on strategy, more confidence in how media is being evaluated, and more consistency across every touchpoint.

We’re on the cutting edge of understanding the opportunity AI presents for the advertising ecosystem, especially brand safety and suitability. We have learned that when AI consumes content, it is precise and effective. It excels at understanding content and context at a massive scale.

This is important because a large part of brand safety and suitability is trying to understand content and decide on behalf of a brand whether that content is safe and suitable.

AI agents are a precise and effective solution

Scope3’s new Brand Standards product mobilizes bespoke AI agents that learn what works and what doesn’t work for your brand, putting top-of-the-line machine learning technology in the hands of brands to help them tackle the stickiest problem in advertising.

AI agents solve for everything that makes current brand safety and suitability solutions difficult. Their solutions are:

• Accurate: keywords, blocklists, and content taxonomies trade in generalizations. AI agents can fully digest content without relying on keywords, making them far more accurate than traditional solutions.
• Nuanced: AI agents are great at handling complexity and nuance, and can analyze content on a much more granular level than keywords, blocklists, and taxonomies.
• Explainable: Agents provide advertisers with their reasoning for deeming content brand unsafe or brand suitable, unlike blocklists and keyword blocking.
• Bespoke: AI agents are designed by advertisers to meet their own unique brand needs and are informed by a deep understanding of brand values.
• Transparent: Agents provide advertisers with a complete record of the content they blocked and pursued, allowing advertisers to make adjustments and improve the model over time.

Brand Standards is not a buying tool. The product enables a brand or agency to build a bespoke AI agent that digests and understands the core needs of the brand from a safety and suitability perspective. Other important factors, like a brand’s desire to incorporate guidance on sustainability, can be included in the training process. These agents can then be used to make better decisions when buying media, both across programmatic and other channels, like direct-sold or native advertising.

The future of brand safety and suitability is powered by agentic AI.

Contact Scope3 today to set up your very own agent with Brand Standards and make sure next time you buy media, you aren’t going in blind.