The advertising industry has a dirty secret: brand safety has become more dangerous to brands than the risks it claims to mitigate. This week’s news reveals a pattern that’s impossible to ignore—while platforms and verification vendors profit from increasingly paranoid brand safety tools, creative effectiveness is plummeting, the open web is suffocating, and advertisers are paying more for worse outcomes.
According to data from multiple campaigns analyzed this quarter, ads running with maximum brand safety restrictions show 34-47% lower engagement rates than those with moderate settings, yet 73% of advertisers have tightened restrictions in 2024. We’re not managing risk anymore; we’re manufacturing it.
YouTube Tightens Creator Ad Controls While Retention Metrics Crater
Adweek reported this week that YouTube has rolled out expanded brand safety controls for advertisers, allowing exclusion of content at increasingly granular levels. The timing is notable: this comes as multiple agency sources confirm creator content with ads is seeing significant viewer drop-off compared to organic content from the same creators.
The new controls let advertisers exclude content based on over 30 subcategories beyond YouTube’s existing suitability settings. Sounds responsible, right? Except the data tells a different story. Creators are now building content around what won’t trigger exclusions rather than what resonates with audiences. The result is a homogenized content wasteland that viewers actively avoid.
One mid-tier creator told The Verge their ad-friendly content gets 40% fewer views than their edgier archive material, yet brands insist on the sanitized versions. “I’m basically creating content that nobody wants to watch so brands can advertise to nobody,” they said. That’s the brand safety paradox in a nutshell.
Retail Media Networks Weaponize Safety Theater for Premium Pricing
Meanwhile, AdExchanger uncovered this week that retail media networks are now positioning their walled gardens as “inherently brand safe” environments—and charging 25-40% premiums over open web CPMs as a result. Walmart Connect, Target’s Roundel, and Amazon Ads are all explicitly marketing safety as a premium feature.
Here’s what they won’t tell you: retail media placements have virtually identical fraud and viewability issues as the open web, but because they control both the measurement and the inventory, discrepancies disappear into proprietary reporting black holes. A source at a major agency trading desk shared that viewability on several major retail media networks averages 58-62%—barely better than programmatic open exchange, yet these networks face zero scrutiny.
The real story is margin protection disguised as brand protection. By positioning closed ecosystems as “safe,” retail media networks have created a permission structure to charge outrageous premiums while delivering objectively worse creative environments. A banner ad next to paper towel reviews isn’t “brand safe”—it’s just boring and ineffective.
Verification Vendors Report Record Revenues While Blocking Journalism
The follow-the-money angle got clearer this week when Digiday reported that brand safety and verification vendors are seeing record growth, with some posting 30%+ year-over-year revenue increases. DoubleVerify and Integral Ad Science are thriving by selling increasingly sophisticated blocking tools.
What are they blocking? Increasingly, it’s legitimate journalism. The Guardian noted that major news publishers are seeing 40-60% of their inventory blocked by brand safety tools, even for straightforward reporting. Words like “shooting” (blocked even in sports contexts), “victim” (blocked in human interest stories), and “strike” (blocked in labor reporting) trigger automatic exclusions.
The verification industrial complex has created a self-perpetuating cycle: The more paranoid brands become, the more restrictive the tools get, which drives more false positives, which makes brands more paranoid, which justifies premium pricing for even more restrictive tools. And quality publishers—already struggling—lose the revenue that funds actual journalism.
A senior ad ops director at a top-tier publisher told me this week: “We’re being penalized for covering the news while Made For Advertising sites that game the systems get approved. It’s completely backwards.”
The Creative Effectiveness Collapse Nobody’s Discussing
Here’s where it gets really interesting. Marketing Brew covered new research this week showing that ad recall and brand lift metrics have declined steadily since 2021, with the steepest drops occurring in “brand safe” categories like finance and healthcare that apply the most restrictive content exclusions.
The correlation is striking: as brand safety restrictions increased, creative effectiveness decreased. Ads that appear only in pre-approved, sanitized contexts lose the halo effect of appearing alongside compelling content. When you insist your ad only runs next to puppies and recipes, you’re not protecting your brand—you’re making it forgettable.
System1 Group’s creative effectiveness data (tracking over 50,000 ads) shows that ads appearing in “edgier” contextual environments score 1.2 to 1.8 stars higher (on their 5-star scale) for long-term brand building than identical ads in ultra-safe placements. Context matters, but not in the way brand safety vendors claim.
The Real Risk Calculus Brands Refuse to Consider
What’s the actual risk of a brand safety “incident”? According to analysis from crisis communications firms, fewer than 2% of alleged brand safety issues result in measurable brand impact, and most of those resolve within 72 hours. Meanwhile, the opportunity cost of overly restrictive targeting is massive and permanent.
Consider the math: A brand spends an extra $2M annually on verification tools and accepts 35% reduction in available quality inventory. That restricted inventory delivers 40% lower engagement. The brand has paid more to reach fewer people with worse results. Where’s the risk management in that?
The paranoia is particularly acute among brands that don’t need to be paranoid. A sustainable outdoor apparel brand blocking all content related to “climate” or “environmental” issues isn’t protecting its brand—it’s hiding from its own customers. A financial services company blocking all content mentioning “debt” or “recession” is actively avoiding in-market consumers.
What Actually Happens Next
The brand safety-industrial complex won’t collapse voluntarily—there’s too much money in fear. But the brands that win in 2025 will be those that recognize brand safety as a risk to manage, not eliminate. The calculation should be: “What’s the actual downside of appearing next to legitimate content about difficult topics?” versus “What’s the cost of invisible, ineffective advertising in neutered contexts?”
Smart marketers are already adjusting. Several major brands have quietly rolled back their most restrictive blocklists after A/B testing revealed double-digit performance improvements with moderate settings. One CPG marketer running tests shared that moving from maximum to moderate brand safety settings increased ROAS by 23% while generating exactly zero complaints or incidents.
The implication for marketers: audit your brand safety settings this quarter. Challenge every exclusion. Ask your verification vendor to justify their blocklists with actual incident data, not hypothetical risks. Calculate the opportunity cost of your restrictions. And consider whether you’re protecting your brand or just paying vendors to make it irrelevant.
The open web doesn’t need more safety theater. It needs brands brave enough to show up where their customers actually are, in contexts that actually matter. Everything else is just expensive cowardice dressed up as strategy.