Brand safety simply isn’t enough; consumer safety is the new priority
Partner content
As scrutiny of AI, social platforms and the internet increases, trust is quietly becoming one of the most valuable forms of media currency.
The UK Government announced plans to ban social media for under-16s by Spring 2027. For advertisers, this is the clearest signal yet that the environments ad budgets fund have become a matter of public accountability.
The under-16s social media ban and lawsuits across the US have shown that brand safety alone is no longer sufficient. On these social platforms, a brand may be safe because it doesn’t appear next to harmful, misleading, or inappropriate content, but the ad revenue itself props up a potentially harmful platform.
But it’s not just about socials. Across the media ecosystem, mis- and disinformation are rife, low-quality AI-generated content is everywhere, and consumer trust is in freefall. Marketers need to ask more pointed questions during media planning. Is a media environment safe for our brand? Great, but is it safe for our consumers?
The answer matters for both our society and the brands helping shape it.
We’re measuring the wrong things
Efficiency, reach, cost. All-important metrics. They look great in a spreadsheet for the CFO.
But they paint only a small part of the picture.
Media shouldn’t be evaluated solely on these metrics, because by advertising in the right environments, brands can build value through trust, credibility, resilience, social benefit and public discourse. These values are harder to quantify, but that doesn’t make them any less significant.
Consumers increasingly value media that upholds independence, transparency, and credibility.
This is why consumer safety and media quality are becoming inseparable. A premium media environment protects both brands and consumers from having to independently verify every claim they see online by providing context, accountability and trust.
There’s always talk about which ‘currency’ is most significant in advertising; attention took many of the headlines last year. But as scrutiny of AI, social platforms and the internet increases, trust is quietly becoming one of the most valuable forms of media currency.
Budgets can build trust, or quietly erode it
Trust, or the lack of it, is exactly why advertisers should be scrutinising where their budgets go.
UK consumers report spending around 43% of their online time inside walled gardens, while roughly 70% of advertiser money goes there. This gap that represents swathes of wasted media, an over-inflated share of budget propping up environments that consumers increasingly distrust.
These are the same environments the Government has now moved against, where harmful content and addictive design sit alongside a wider decline in quality, from misinformation to low-quality AI-generated content.
Brand safety is only one part of the puzzle. An ad can be perfectly brand safe and still fund a much bigger problem. So advertisers need to apply the same scrutiny to their spend that society is applying to the platforms. The answer isn’t to abandon social altogether. It’s to diversify into trusted, transparent environments where a brand has real visibility and control, and to treat consumer safety as a planning decision, not an afterthought.
AI requires the same approach. As AI increasingly shapes how content is discovered and how consumers find what they need, it has not changed the underlying question: where do people place their trust? Our research found 95% of consumers double-check AI-generated results, frequently verifying them on the open internet.
As AI becomes the layer between consumers and information, trusted media matters more, not less. Whether the pull is a social feed or an AI answer, where a brand chooses to spend is a statement about the ecosystem it wants to exist.
It’s time to change the way we review campaigns
At the end of any and every campaign, advertisers review its success. Spreadsheets and decks outline objectives, KPIs and results. A key question is: did my media investment work?
The answer is far more complex than it’s ever been, and ROI can’t be defined just by spend, income and profit.
Brands need to be building brand equity, at the same time as delivering performance in the now – with the latter being far easier to quantify, but not always as important as the former.
Brand equity needs to be part of the conversation, and crucially, how it’s built. It’s built by showing up in trusted, credible and premium environments. It’s built by using your investment to help sustain a responsible, conscious and transparent media ecosystem – one that’s safe not just for brands, but for consumers.
Appearing in an AI answer means little if the brands behind it haven’t built trust elsewhere first.
The ANA’s most recent programmatic transparency benchmark found that advertisers who prioritise fraud-free, high-quality inventory converted 54% of their spend into qualified impressions, compared with 32% for the rest. Put simply: the same budget, invested in quality environments, delivers 68% more qualified reach.
The strongest competitive advantage in the future of advertising isn’t just how you show up, it’s where you show up.
Phil Duffield is the VP, Northern Europe at The Trade Desk