6 brand safety best practices to inform your 2026 marketing plan

Brand safety isn’t just a checkbox anymore. As marketing moves faster (and leans more on automation), the risks get bigger too.

Here’s your guide to brand safety in 2026.

What is brand safety?

Brand safety is a set of practices brands use to avoid being associated with inappropriate content that could damage their reputation.

Brand safety is most often discussed in the context of digital advertising — specifically ad placement.

However, it also applies to organic content in digital media. Brand safety guidelines ensure your content aligns with relevant regulations, advertising standards, and audience expectations to prevent a brand crisis.

Who decides what content is “safe” or “unsafe”?

Ultimately, brands decide what content is “safe” or “unsafe” for their advertising, but those decisions are shaped by laws, industry standards, and platform rules.

Before launching a brand safety strategy, every brand needs to define its risk tolerance. That’s how close they’re willing to get to controversial or sensitive content. 

Some topics, like pornography, terrorism, and misinformation, are obvious no-gos for ad placement. These are called the brand safety floor, a term used by the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) to describe content categories advertisers should avoid entirely.

Similarly, the ad tech industry has a “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:

1. Military conflict
2. Obscenity
3. Drugs
4. Tobacco
5. Adult
6. Arms
7. Crime
8. Death/injury
9. Online piracy
10. Hate speech
11. Terrorism
12. Spam/harmful sites
13. Fake news

Not every category on this list applies equally to every brand. For example, a vaping brand may be fine advertising near tobacco-related content or adult-themed material. (And vice versa for an adult brand.)

Still, some boundaries are non-negotiable. Laws, financial regulations, and social platform monetization guidelines often make those decisions for you.

It’s a good idea to take things a step further by defining what is brand-suitable.

TL;DR:

• Brands ultimately decide what content is safe or unsafe, but legal, industry, and platform rules shape those choices.
• The brand safety floor includes different types of content most advertisers avoid entirely, like terrorism and misinformation.
• Not all “unsafe” categories apply equally to every brand. Risk tolerance varies by industry and audience.

Brand safety vs. brand suitability

While brand safety and brand suitability are closely related, they solve different problems:

• Brand safety is about protecting your brand reputation
• Brand suitability is about alignment with your brand values

For example, a brand might run ads next to true crime content. From a brand safety perspective, the content is compliant and legally acceptable.

However, a wellness brand may determine that association with crime and violence conflicts with its brand values. In this case, the content is brand safe but not brand suitable.

That’s why both perspectives matter. Legal and compliance teams help define what’s brand safe, while marketing and PR teams help decide what’s brand suitable.

What are common threats to brand safety?

Brand safety issues often arise when brands lose control over context, conversations, or technology.

Below are some of the most common brand safety missteps:

Ad placements near inappropriate content

Ads appearing next to inappropriate or harmful content are one of the most common threats to brand safety in digital advertising.

In digital advertising, brands typically buy placements through networks or platforms, not individual publishers. Likewise, on social media, advertisers pay for placement on the platform, rather than controlling exactly where their ads appear. 

As a result, brands don’t always have full control over the surrounding content.

When that goes wrong, the fallout can be fast. For example, Hyundai pulled ads from X after they appeared next to antisemitic content.

Source: Nancy Levine Stearns

To reduce risk, most social platforms offer built-in brand safety and content exclusion tools, which we’ll cover later in this post.

Bots and trolls

Bots and trolls are a persistent threat to brand safety because they can inflate engagement and even cause reputational damage.

While engagement is a primary goal for many brands, not all engagement is valuable. Bots create fake likes, clicks, and comments that warp performance data, while trolls show up to provoke or derail conversations on purpose.

Left unchecked, these negative actors can wreak havoc in your comments and DMs. Setting up keyword filters for comments can 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 drive ad fraud by generating fake clicks, wasting ad spend and making campaign performance look better on paper than it actually is.

Problematic influencers

Influencers can be a brand safety risk when their behavior, opinions, or past posts don’t line up with your brand’s values.

Working with creators is a powerful way to boost reach and credibility. But today, brands are also engaging more casually by commenting on creator posts, even without a formal relationship.

This tactic is known as outbound engagement, and 41% of respondents to Hootsuite’s 2025 Social Trends Survey have already tried it.

But here’s the catch: Any interaction with a creator — whether a paid collaboration or a simple comment — ties your brand to their content. If that creator shares views or opinions, the association can reflect back on you.

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 former Team Lead, Social Marketing.

Most brands carefully vet influencers before signing a deal. But comments often happen without the same level of scrutiny. To stay brand safe, advise your team to do a quick background check before engaging publicly.

Pro tip 💡: Build a shortlist of brand-safe creators your team can engage with confidently, and review it regularly. It’s a simple move that can save you a lot of cleanup later.

Using a hashtag or meme associated with risky content

Hashtags and memes can be great for reach, but meanings shift fast on the internet, and some can carry baggage that isn’t obvious at first glance.

For instance, a hashtag that looks harmless can be tied to controversial conversations or communities your brand definitely doesn’t want to sit next to.

So make sure to do your research first.

Hootsuite Listening lets you take initiative by conducting 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, 79% of social media managers now use AI daily, according to Hootsuite’s 2026 Social Media Trends report. 

AI is here to stay, but used carelessly — especially when creating content across multiple platforms and formats — can create serious risks around data privacy, copyright infringement, and compliance.

One major brand safety concern is data protection. For example, feeding proprietary or sensitive information into AI tools can create exposure you can’t take back.

Another risk involves copyright and intellectual property. If you don’t know what a tool was trained on, you can’t be sure copyrighted material isn’t slipping into your outputs.

This is especially important in highly regulated industries like government and finance, where 82% of social marketers use AI to produce and optimize content.

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.

Pro tip 💡: Hootsuite’s Generative AI Chatbot was specifically designed with brand safety in mind.

How to build a brand-safe marketing strategy

Building a brand-safe marketing strategy starts with clear boundaries, collaboration with the right teams, and guardrails everyone in your org understands.

Here are three critical brand safety measures:

1. Put together brand safety guidelines

Clear brand safety guidelines are the foundation of a brand-safe marketing strategy.

Start by using the industry-standard “dirty dozen” content categories as a baseline. From there, tailor the list to match your brand’s risk tolerance.

These rules should apply everywhere your brand shows up, from organic social posts to paid ads and placements.

These rules matter even more when brands experiment more with creative boundaries. According to Hootsuite’s 2025 Social Media Trends report, 43% of organizations have tested a new tone of voice, personality, or persona on social media in the past year.

Experimentation is a key element in marketing, but without clear limits, it can introduce brand safety risks.

Take Dunkin’s Halloween campaign, for example. The innuendo went far, but not by accident. You can bet multiple teams weighed in on how far was too far before anything went live.

Source: Dunkin’

When pushing the limits, it’s important to be crystal clear on where they are. Define what’s allowed, who signs off, and when legal or PR needs to step in. 

And if you’re boosting experimental content, tighten your ad placements too. What works for a standard campaign may not be appropriate everywhere when the tone shifts.

2. Consult other teams within your organization

Building effective brand safety guidelines requires input from multiple teams across your organization.

Get relevant teams and leaders together for a thorough review of your overall brand and social media guidelines, along with your brand’s messaging, 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 help you stay compliant with advertising standards and industry regulations. Check in about memes, celebrity photos, and anything else that may involve other people’s intellectual property.

But legal isn’t the only stakeholder that matters:

• PR teams can identify potential reputational risks, even when content is legally compliant.
• IT and security teams can make sure marketing and AI tools are used safely.
• Customer care teams can surface common customer concerns and sensitivities that may not be obvious during campaign planning.

Pro tip 💡: Set up approval workflows to ensure critical stakeholders can provide input at the appropriate stage.

3. Train your team

Employees are proud of their work, and they may share employer-related content on their social profiles. In most cases, this is a great thing. An employee advocacy program can 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 and strategies

These six best practices help teams stay in control, reduce exposure, and protect their reputation:

1. Use real-time monitoring
2. Do your research before jumping on social trends
3. Keep an eye on (and respond to) comments and messages
4. Use negative targeting
5. Use platform-specific brand safety advertising tools
6. Make a social media crisis plan and response strategy

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.

#1 Easy Social Listening

Brand mentions, trending topics, and sentiment at your fingertips. Enhance your social strategy with the insights that matter.

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2. Do your research before jumping on social trends

Before jumping in on any social trend, check that it aligns with your brand values. 

“Brands should never take part in a trend or use a meme without knowing the context of where or who it is from,” notes Riswick.

Ask yourself: 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 stay 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.

Pro tip 💡:  Consult your legal, social care and customer service teams for terms to include in your blocklist.

5. Use platform-specific brand safety advertising tools

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. Find more tools to protect your brand.

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.