When businesses invest in digital advertising, performance is always the priority. However, it’s not the only part of the equation. Where your ads appear matters just as much, both for performance and general brand safety.
Without the right controls in place, ads can appear alongside low-quality, irrelevant, or inappropriate content, which can undermine brand perception and waste your advertising investment.
What brand safety actually means
Brand safety is the steps taken to ensure your ads don’t appear in environments that could harm your brand.
This includes:
- Low-quality or spam-heavy websites.
- Irrelevant mobile apps or placements.
- Content categories that don’t align with your brand.
- Environments that don’t drive meaningful performance.
Having brand safety measures in place isn’t all that matters; what matters is how actively this risk is managed on an ongoing basis.
How brand safety works across platforms
Advertising platforms provide a range of built-in controls to help guide where ads can appear. For example, on Google and YouTube, advertisers can choose different levels of inventory quality:
- Expanded inventory: broader reach, with fewer restrictions.
- Standard inventory: a balanced approach (most popular).
- Limited inventory: stricter controls, reducing exposure to sensitive content.
Similar controls exist across Meta and other platforms, allowing advertisers to exclude certain content types, topics and placements.
These settings form the baseline for general brand protection, but on their own, they’re not enough. That’s where active performance management with Threesides comes in.
How Threesides manages brand safety
We actively manage and refine where your ads appear over time.
This includes:
- Platform-level controls
- We apply appropriate inventory settings and content exclusions across all platforms, based on your brand and risk profile.
- Placement exclusions
- We maintain a comprehensive and evolving exclusion list, built from thousands of known low-quality or irrelevant placements along with underperforming websites and apps identified across accounts.
- Ongoing monitoring and optimisation
- Brand safety isn’t a one-time setup. We regularly review where ads are appearing and take action where needed.
There’s a strong overlap between brand safety and performance.
Low-quality placements don’t just create brand risk; they typically deliver poor results. By focusing on both where ads appear and how those placements perform, we’re able to make sure your ad spend budget is going toward the placements that are brand-appropriate and effective for driving performance.
Brand safety isn’t about eliminating all risk; it’s about managing it properly.