With Brand Standards, publishers can take control of brand safety and suitability

Brand safety and suitability have long been a black box for publishers. Content gets blocked, monetization suffers, and there’s often no clear explanation, let alone recourse. Traditional tools rely on crude signals like keywords or content categories, leading to high-quality content being unfairly excluded from ad campaigns.

Take, for example, a baked ziti recipe page where the writer casually mentions enjoying the dish with a glass of their favorite merlot. While the content is entirely safe and appropriate, legacy tools may block the article simply because of the keyword ‘merlot,’ overlooking nuance and missing a valuable opportunity for brands.

Scope3 Brand Standards changes this dynamic by rearchitecting traditional brand safety and suitability practices—introducing a modern approach built for today’s nuanced and complex media landscape.

Powered by Scope3’s Agentic Media Platform, Brand Standards leverages custom AI models to manage brand suitability for advertisers, reducing overblocking to surface more qualified inventory for campaigns.

As part of Brand Standards, Scope3 is working closely with leading publishers to classify their inventory at a granular level, offering full transparency into how content is evaluated and, for the first time, the ability to challenge misclassifications.

See Exactly Why Content Is Blocked

Scope3 provides a publisher-specific dashboard that reveals how content is being classified by both vertical-specific models and brand-custom AI agents. Publishers can drill into specific content artifacts to understand which models are flagging them and why.

Instead of a static list of blocked sites (or worse, a black box), Brand Standards delivers natural language explanations for every decision. Publishers get clear insight into what made a piece of content appear unsafe or unsuitable to a particular brand.

For example, imagine an ad operations manager for a cooking website sees on the platform that one of their recipes was blocked by a brand-custom agent. The publisher can click through to see the exact webpage that was blocked (say, a three-layer cake recipe) as well as the reason for it being blocked (perhaps, the agent was built for a wellness brand seeking suitable alignment with topics focused on healthy living and nutrition).

Disagree? Challenge the Classification

If a publisher believes their content was unfairly flagged or characterized, they can submit a reclassification request directly in the platform. Perhaps the recipe page mentioned above actually offers a healthy alternative to traditional three-layer cakes, with more nutritious ingredients.

The publisher can submit a reclassification request with rationale for the wellness brand to reconsider. It’s quick, easy, and gives the publisher a voice in the decision-making process.

This feedback loop not only restores revenue opportunities, but also improves the underlying models over time. When a publisher submits a reclassification request through the Brand Standards dashboard, they’re feeding new, labeled data back into the system.

Unlock New Revenue Through Contextual Alignment

Brand Standards doesn’t just preserve revenue — it helps grow it.

Because the AI agents analyze content at a deep, contextual level, they’re able to recognize not just what to avoid, but also what aligns with a brand’s values. That means high-quality, relevant content is more likely to be surfaced as suitable, even if it falls outside traditional content categories.

For publishers, this creates new opportunities to sell premium inventory that might otherwise be overlooked by rigid taxonomies or overly cautious blocklists. When content is accurately understood and matched with the right brand, it opens the door to incremental revenue from advertisers actively seeking alignment.

A Smarter, More Empowered Future for Publishers

Scope3’s Brand Standards heralds a new approach to brand safety and suitability, making it easier for publishers and advertisers to move in lock step. This unlocks stronger collaboration towards shared goals, like increased support for high-quality media and more effective ad spend.

Built on AI agents that analyze content with context and nuance, Brand Standards replaces outdated blocklists with precision and adaptability. Because these agents are trained on brand-specific values, publishers gain unprecedented insight into what advertisers actually want, fostering a virtuous cycle of communication between the two sides of the ad ecosystem.

For the first time, brand safety isn’t something done to publishers. It’s something they can actively shape. Start using Brand Standards today to take control of brand safety and suitability.