The online world can be a scary place. Brands need to understand the lurking threats alongside the many opportunities. Here’s your guide to brand safety in 2025.
What is brand safety?
Brand safety is a set of practices that aim to ensure that a brand is not associated with inappropriate content that could damage its reputation.
This is essential to maintain audience trust.
Brand safety measures are most often discussed in the context of the digital advertising ecosystem – specifically ad placement.
But in a broader sense, they also apply to all organic types of content in digital media. Brand safety guidelines ensure that your content aligns with relevant regulations, advertising standards, and audience expectations to prevent a brand crisis.
Who decides what is “safe” or “unsafe”?
Before executing a brand safety strategy, you’ll need to know your brand’s risk tolerance.
Some topics, like pornography, terrorism, and misinformation, are obvious no-gos for content creation and ad placement. The Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) refers to avoiding these types of topics as the “brand safety floor.”
The ad tech industry has a generally accepted “dirty dozen” list of content categories to avoid for brand safety. For the most part, it aligns with GARM. The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) added a 13th category to round out the list:
- Military conflict
- Obscenity
- Drugs
- Tobacco
- Adult
- Arms
- Crime
- Death/injury
- Online piracy
- Hate speech
- Terrorism
- Spam/harmful sites
- Fake news
This entire list may not make sense for all brands. A vaping brand, for example, will likely not want to avoid the tobacco category, and may also be comfortable in the adult content space. (And vice versa for an adult brand.)
Still, brands in these categories need to be very aware of the specific limits placed on their advertising strategy. In some cases, the law or industry regulations decide what is brand-safe. Social platform monetization guidelines also come into play here.
But most brands will need to decide for themselves exactly what they view as a brand-safe environment. And it’s a good idea to take things a step further by defining what is brand-suitable.
To clarify:
- Brand safety is about protecting your brand’s reputation
- Brand suitability is about alignment with your brand values
Your legal and compliance teams are important voices in the conversation about brand safety. Your marketing and PR teams are the experts on what is brand suitable.
Common threats to brand safety
Ad placements near inappropriate content
As we said right at the top, the digital advertising industry is the first thing that comes to mind when most people think about brand safety.
Digital advertisers generally buy ad placements through distribution platforms, rather than individual publishers. Likewise on social media, advertisers pay for placement on the platform, rather than controlling exactly where their ads appear.
This can mean your social media ad formats may appear next to inappropriate or harmful content. For example, earlier this year, Hyundai pulled ads from X after they appeared next to extreme anti-semitic content.
NEW: Hyundai Motor America spokesperson emailed me today about its ad on X appearing on a verified “Premium” account that posts pro-Hitler, antisemitic content:
— Nancy Levine Stearns (@nancylevine) April 17, 2024
“We are immediately removing from the site. We are updating our parameters to avoid other instances similar to this.” pic.twitter.com/Y2oK8AVjCl
Later in this post we highlight the brand safety advertising tools built into the major social platforms.
Bots and trolls
Engagement online is a primary goal for many brands. But you want to be interacting with real people, not bots. And as the old saying goes, you never want to feed the trolls.
Left unchecked, these negative actors can wreak havoc in your comments and DMs. Setting up keyword filters for comments helps keep the worst offenders in check.
They can also create negative conversations about you on non-owned social channels. In this case, a tool like Hootsuite Listening helps you catch brand-damaging content before it gets out of control.
Bots can also be used for ad fraud by creating fraudulent clicks that dilute the value of your ad spend on digital marketing campaigns.
Problematic influencers
Collaborating with a public figure, influencer, or content creator can expand your brand awareness and reach.
In the past, this primarily meant working with the influencer to create new content.
A newer trend is for brands to comment on creator posts, even when there is no relationship between the creator and the brand. This is known as outbound engagement, and 41% of respondents to Hootsuite’s 2025 Social Trends Survey have already tried it.
Any relationship with an outside party presents some risk for brands, whether it’s a full collaboration or just a comment. Influencers’ views and opinions on their channels may not always align with your brand.
In fact, “aligning with an influencer, creator or celebrity that during the course of your partnership says or does something that doesn’t align with your business” is one of the top threats to brand security according to Trish Riswick, Hootsuite’s Team Lead, Social Marketing.
Your brand would clearly research a potential influencer before striking a collaboration deal. But you may not put as much thought into what seems like a simple comment. Keep your brand safe by doing some quick research before commenting.
Note that outbound engagement comments are most effective within 24 hours of the initial post. Make it easy for your team to engage quickly by creating a brand-safe list of content creators and review it regularly.
Using a hashtag or meme associated with risky content
When launching a new campaign or content series, hashtags and memes can really help improve reach and engagement. But you have to do your research first.
Hootsuite Listening lets you conduct in-depth research on hashtags and keywords before you start your campaign to avoid any embarrassing incidents.
Inappropriate use of AI
Over the last year, AI has become a mainstream tool used for just about every aspect of marketing. For example, more than three-quarters (77%) of social marketers used AI tools to produce text from scratch in 2024.
Source: Hootsuite Social Trends Report 2025
AI is here to stay. But from a brand safety standpoint, it’s important to understand the potential risks. For example, are you allowed to input proprietary information into AI tools? Consider how the company could be affected if this information becomes part of the tool’s training database.
On the flip side, are you sure the AI tools you’re using for content creation have appropriate controls in place to protect others’ copyrighted materials? Do you know what the tool was trained on?
This is especially important in highly regulated industries like government and finance, where even more social marketers (82%) use AI to produce content from scratch, in an environment with many compliance requirements.
Finally, if you’re using generative AI for customer service, it’s critically important to control the data inputs and training materials, so that your chatbot never creates a brand safety issue.
Tip: Hootsuite’s Generative AI Chatbot was specifically designed with brand safety in mind.
How to build a brand-safe marketing strategy
Put together brand safety guidelines
Start with the dirty dozen categories above, then develop the list further to suit your own specific brand. Think here in terms of both content creation and content placement through digital providers.
Hootsuite’s 2025 Social Media Trends report shows that nearly half (43%) of organizations have experimented with a new tone of voice, personality, or persona on social media in the last year.
Sometimes, this takes things in such a different direction that brand safety concerns may arise. You can bet multiple teams were asked to weigh in on exactly how far Dunkin’ could take the sexual innuendo with their Halloween 2024 campaign without compromising the brand. (The verdict? Pretty far!)
Hootsuite’s Trends Report shows that these experimental content campaigns have a positive impact on the business, and predicts this type of experimentation will become more common in 2025. When pushing the limits, it’s important to have very clear guidelines about how far the social team can go, who’s in charge of approving content, and when legal and PR teams need to get involved.
If you’re boosting these experimental ads or incorporating other forms of online advertising into these campaigns, you may need to restrict your placement categories further than you would for a normal campaign. For example, regular Dunkin’ ads would be just fine in context next to content about kids, families, or education, but some content from the Halloween campaign would most certainly not be.
Bonus: Get a free, customizable social media policy template to quickly and easily create guidelines for your company and employees.
Consult other teams within your organization
How do you go about creating (and reviewing, and updating) those brand safety guidelines?
Get relevant teams and leaders from across the organization together for a thorough review of your overall brand guidelines and social media guidelines, along with your vision and mission statement. Work together to build a set of brand safety and brand suitability guidelines, and add this to your social media guidelines document.
The most important team to connect with is legal. They’ll be able to provide guidelines to ensure you comply with advertising standards and any regulations relevant to your specific industry. Hint: Definitely check in with the legal team on issues that may involve other people’s intellectual property, like memes, photos of celebrities, or anything that could be construed as belonging to another brand.
But they’re not the only team with relevant expertise. For example, your PR team has insight on what could create a brand crisis (even if everything you did is perfectly legal). Your IT team can help you make sure you’re using tools in a brand-safe way. And your customer care team can help identify specific areas of customer concern or audience values you may not have considered.
Tip: Set up approval workflows to ensure critical stakeholders can provide input at the appropriate stage.
Train your team
Your brand’s social footprint extends well beyond the social team. Employees are proud of their work, and they may well share employer-related content on their social profiles. In most cases, this is a very good thing. An employee advocacy program can vastly extend your reach.
But with any collaboration, there’s risk. You can’t control employees’ personal profiles. However, you can mitigate this risk by establishing a social media policy. Include a section outlining the importance of brand safety.
It’s also a good idea to include brand safety training as part of your onboarding process. Don’t forget to include your brand’s leaders in this training! They can be some of the most visible brand representatives online. If you work with advertising agencies, make sure they are also in the loop.
6 brand safety best practices
1. Use real-time monitoring
Social listening is a marketer’s best line of defense when it comes to avoiding brand safety incidents.
Fortunately, every Hootsuite plan includes everything you need to get started with social listening.
Use Quick Search for personalized insights on your brand.
You can track what people are saying about you, your top competitors, your products — up to two keywords tracking anything at all over the last 7 days.
Plus, you can use Quick Search to analyze things like:
- Key metrics. Are more people talking about you this week? What’s the vibe of their posts? Hootsuite Listening doesn’t just track what people are saying — it uses enhanced sentiment analysis to tell you how they really feel.
- Top themes. How are people talking about you? What are the most popular positive and negative posts about? Which other conversations are you showing up in?
- Results. Ready to get into specifics? The results tab will show you a selection of popular posts related to your search terms — you can filter by sentiment, channel, and more.
Brand mentions, trending topics, and sentiment at your fingertips. Enhance your social strategy with the insights that matter.
Start free 30-day trial2. Do your research before jumping on social trends
“Brands should never take part in a trend or use a meme without knowing the context of where or who it is from,” Riswick says.
Before jumping in on any social trend, ask yourself if it aligns with your brand values. What’s the sentiment associated with the trend? Is the hashtag too risqué?
Hootsuite Listening helps you understand trending hashtags, brands and events anywhere in the world, so you can make sure a trend is safe for your brand before you engage.
3. Keep an eye on (and respond to) comments and messages
To make sure that you never miss a tricky message, use a unified social media inbox to capture interactions from all of your accounts.
With Hootsuite Inbox, you can bridge the gap between social listening, brand safety, engagement, and customer service — and manage all of your social media messages in one place.
Bonus: You’ll also see responses to your outbound engagement comments, so you can be sure the conversations you’re having on other people’s channels stays brand-safe, too.
4. Use negative targeting
If you know there are terms or phrases that you never want your brand’s content to be associated with, you can input a list of these terms as “negative keywords” into a blocklist to avoid related placements on most platforms.
Tip: Consult your legal, social care and customer service teams for terms to include.
5. Use platform-specific brand safety advertising tools
The social platforms have brand safety tools that allow you to control what kind of content your ads appear next to.
- Meta: The platform’s Brand Safety Hub offers brand safety settings like inventory filters, publisher and content block lists, topic and content type exclusions, and content allow lists at the ad account level. You can choose to make individual ad sets more restrictive as well.
- X (Twitter): Exclude up to 4,000 negative keywords and 2,000 negative account handles, as well as certain ad placements. For video campaigns, exclude content categories or handles.
- TikTok: Choose an inventory filter risk level for ad adjacency placement, and exclude categories like gambling or youth content or vertical-related content misaligned with your brand.
- LinkedIn: Create an exclude list of profiles and Pages, or block specific partner sites on the LinkedIn Audience Network.
- Pinterest: Opt out of expanded targeting and certain ad placements, and apply a negative list for keyword exclusion.
6. Make a social media crisis plan and response strategy
A social media crisis plan is a great tool to protect your brand’s safety. It should include:
- Criteria for when to pause posts during major world events (and criteria to decide when to resume posting)
- Guidelines for responses to large volumes of customer complaints and issues
- Messaging approval processes and contact information for key stakeholders required for approvals
- An internal communications plan
With Hootsuite, you can pause all posts with one click and show a warning for all users in your organization.
Brand safety statistics
Still not sure you need to worry about brand security? These numbers don’t lie.
- 35% of consumers hold brands accountable for ads appearing near unsafe content (Integral Ad Science)
- 43% of consumers feel unfavorable toward brands whose ads are adjacent to brand unsafe content (IAS)
- 56% of consumers are unlikely to purchase from an ad that appears next to unsafe content (IAS)
- 60% of programmatic ad experts say brand safety/suitability is one of the biggest causes for concern (WARC)
Save time managing your social media presence with Hootsuite. Publish and schedule posts, find relevant conversions, engage your target audience, measure results, and more — all from a single dashboard. Try it free today.
