How Brand Standards Stops Overblocking Without Sacrificing Safety

Agentic Solutions is a new series from Scope3 exploring how brand agents solve advertising's toughest challenges. Each installment examines a specific buyer pain point and shows how capabilities within Scope3's Agentic Advertising Platform transform these challenges into opportunities for smarter, more sustainable media buying.

What if your brand safety tool is costing you more than it’s protecting you? Keyword-based blocking filters often overblock quality inventory that’s both safe and suitable for your brand, unnecessarily limiting your reach and revenue.

The problem intensifies during live events—elections, breaking news, major sporting events. An article covering a championship basketball game gets flagged for the word "explosive." Reputable election coverage gets blocked for discussing sensitive political topics. When brand safety solutions lack nuance, they create unnecessary losses in reach, revenue, and relevance for both brands and publishers.

Brand Standards is an LLM-powered brand safety and suitability solution within Scope3's brand agents. It analyzes content, tone and meaning against your brand-specific guidelines rather than using restrictive keyword lists. It's fully customizable, allowing you to define what suitability means for your brand—so you can capitalize on high-attention moments while staying in control.

How do brand agents prevent overblocking?

Every brand agent starts with built-in Common Sense Brand Safety (CSBS)—a baseline layer that blocks truly illegal content (explicit violence, terrorism, pornography, child sexual abuse material) without overblocking nuanced content like journalism, satire, and cultural commentary.

From this foundation, Brand Standards lets you layer in your own suitability criteria without blanket keyword blocking.

Brand Standards gives you complete control over brand suitability. You can:

• Appear in truly brand-safe environments without overblocking
• Tailor guardrails to reflect your brand's unique values and risk tolerance
• Access transparent, explainable reasoning behind every placement decision
• Adapt your approach as culture and context shift

This intelligent approach distinguishes between genuine risk and relevant cultural content, enabling brand-safe reach that reflects your specific values.

Do I need to update my brand safety settings for every news event?

No—one of Brand Standards' key advantages is that it's built for longevity. When you set up your brand agent, you define guidelines conceptually rather than chasing specific events.

For example, if you include "product recalls" in your brand suitability parameters, that covers a toy recall today, an automotive recall six months from now, or a food safety issue next year. The agent understands the concept and applies your brand's stance consistently—whether that's avoiding coverage to prevent appearing tone-deaf during a crisis, or leaning in to demonstrate category leadership and consumer trust.

The same applies to other sensitive situations like plant shutdowns, labor disputes, or natural disasters. You're teaching your brand agent the principles, not maintaining an ever-growing list of specific incidents.

This means you shouldn't need to update your Brand Standards prompt every time breaking news happens. Your guidelines already cover it. Of course, culture evolves and truly unprecedented situations may arise. When they do, updating your brand agent is straightforward—prompts can be edited easily, and your agent adapts quickly.

The result? A brand safety solution that scales with your business without constant manual intervention.

How does Brand Standards enhance reach and safety?

With Brand Standards, you can advertise confidently during high-attention moments. Your brand agent ensures you show up in protected environments—even during real-time events like elections and live sporting events—without sacrificing brand safety.

This benefits the entire media ecosystem:

• Expand reach by reclaiming content that keywords would block but is suitable for your brand
• Reduce waste through smarter spend allocation
• Strengthen brand alignment with natural language prompting

Brand Standards transforms safety from a restrictive practice into a flexible tool.

Ready to unlock brand-safe reach? Log in to Scope3's platform now to set up your brand agent, or reach out to learn how brand agents can help you reclaim quality inventory.