Compliance & regulatory
Brand safety
Avoiding ad placement adjacent to harmful, illegal, or off-brand content.
Brand safety is the discipline of keeping ads from running next to content that would damage the brand: extremist content, hate speech, graphic violence, misinformation. Major brands run brand-safety filters (DoubleVerify, IAS, MOAT) at the impression level. For affiliate marketers, brand safety matters less but the inverse is real — the publisher's brand-safety filter can block an affiliate's ads, especially in nutra and crypto.
Example
Programmatic display affiliate campaign sees 30% of bids blocked by DoubleVerify pre-bid because the creative contains 'before/after' weight-loss imagery that the brand-safety filter classifies as 'sensational health.'