Brand safety and viewability are high stakes in today’s dynamic, omnichannel ad ecosystem. We are living in a new era, one in which platforms are proliferating as media behaviors continue to evolve. As a result, marketers are asking tougher questions of the verification tools they rely on to protect their investments and reputations.
We recently asked 50 senior marketing leaders across various industries and company sizes about their experiences with brand safety and/or viewability platforms. The outcome of this timely research is featured in our recently released HUMAN’s Iris Report: Marketers’ Perceptions of Brand Safety and Viewability Tools, which offers insights into how brands can approach their verification strategy and tech stack moving forward.
From Checkbox to Confidence: The New Standards for Trust
Traditional definitions of brand safety and viewability have evolved in tandem with changes in Internet behavior. These new descriptions reflect a more mature understanding of verification’s role, not just as a check-the-box solution, but as a critical contributor to campaign quality.
Brand safety once meant dodging ad placements adjacent to inappropriate content. Now, it’s about aligning with content suitable to brand values and protecting equity in nuanced contexts. Success, therefore, now means appearing only in environments that are not just “safe,” but “suitable.” One marketer we surveyed shared their brand safety definition: “Our ads never appear alongside content that undermines our values, reputation, or audience trust.”
Viewability is, likewise, no longer just about pixels and seconds; it’s about attention, placement, and human impact. Marketers now define success as genuine human exposure, not percentage-based metrics: Was the ad visible for long enough to the right person in the right place? One survey respondent shared that, “Viewability doesn’t necessarily equal attention. People could be multitasking.”
Ultimately, brand safety and viewability help protect advertising investments, but only if verification tools can meet marketers’ evolving definitions and expectations.
Gaps in the System: Why Marketers Are Losing Confidence
Why exactly are modern marketers losing trust in their brand safety and viewability tools? There are three main pain points:
- Over-reliance on outdated keyword blocking, which limits reach and can misclassify suitable content.
- Lack of contextual nuance, which thwarts understanding of content tone—including influencer and social—at the level required to make an informed block-or-not decision.
- Poor transparency and actionable reporting, especially in fast-moving environments.
The consequences of these challenges are steep. Half of marketers cited an internal resource drain, and slightly less than half experienced increased media costs due to faulty verification tools. Thirty percent experienced a loss of customer trust or an outright customer churn, and 26% suffered a measurable decline in brand sentiment. These adverse outcomes also carry downstream effects on marketing planning, which in turn affect the company’s ability to forecast.
Metrics That Matter: Redefining Success in Verification
Just as marketers have redefined their definitions of brand safety and viewability, so, too, have they reimagined how they measure success from these efforts.
Brand safety now means advertising in suitable environments, determined by the contextual alignment with a brand’s values. Viewability means an ad was not just seen, but also noticed and effective. This reinforces the shift to the performance age, where brands expect outcomes and proof.
Many respondents expressed frustrations about the opacity of metrics and the difficulty in connecting those decisions to business outcomes. One shared, “I don’t know if my view is a quality view, and I don’t believe that time viewed can really be an indicator of that.” This shows marketers’ desire to link meaningful metrics to tangible business outcomes (sales, foot traffic, brand lift), not just clicks or impressions.
Toward a New Model: What Marketers Want Next
Where does this leave the state of brand safety and viewability tools? Three core asks clearly emerged from surveyed marketers’ feedback:
- Contextual intelligence: Understanding tone, nuance, and audience fit beyond keywords for the content and the publisher itself. While many advertisers shy away from “made-for-advertising” websites, for instance, others find value in those publishers. As one marketer put it, “I think there is a lack of context in how we implement the safety standards, leading to having more content in the gray area or leading to blocking more content due to a lack of contextual understanding.”
- Transparency: Clearer insight into what’s working and why, especially for attention-based outcomes. This isn’t just about whether an ad was theoretically viewable, but also whether the ad was engaged with. “There’s still a disconnect between high viewability scores and real engagement,” said one marketer. “What gets seen isn’t always what drives action.”
- Speed and reporting: Faster, more reliable feedback loops for real-time optimization. “Need instant feedback on our ads and how we can optimize them to reach and increase views,” said one respondent.
A willingness clearly exists to explore a new approach to brand safety and viewability, one that emphasizes not just the performance numbers but also the process by which they were achieved and the opportunities they reveal.
Conclusion: Building a Future of Trusted Verification
Today’s marketers demand verification solutions that bridge the gap between compliance and confidence. A new, insights-driven approach can be the key to unlocking the value of brand safety and viewability tools as a central component of a digital advertising suite. Download the Iris Report to see how your peers are redefining success in brand safety and viewability.
