The next frontier of brand safety is consumer safety

In an AI-driven media landscape, the advertisers I speak with are asking a familiar question with greater urgency: What makes advertising work?

Reach, attention and engagement remain essential. But with the rise of misinformation and now AI slop, my belief is that media environments that create real value, and safer spaces for consumers, can also create better conditions for advertising to work.

Premium, high-quality media can give people more context, accountability and trusted information, reducing the burden of independently verifying every claim they encounter online. It can make people feel informed and entertained without adding to the stream of content competing for our attention.

It can contribute to advertising effectiveness because it helps protect consumers.

This is not about “saving journalism.” The practical challenge — and opportunity — is to turn qualities such as trust, resilience and consumer safety into clear, usable and effective approaches for media planning. That is where brand safety needs to go next. 

Trusted media protects consumers

Earlier this year, I was introduced to Prof. Dr. Lisa-Charlotte Wolter and her research on value media. Her emerging value media framework asks a straightforward question: Are we measuring the right things? It considers not only reach and efficiency, but also the value people find in trust, credibility and resilience.

As Wolter told me in an interview, “Consumer safety becomes relevant because current metrics primarily capture short-term benefits while potentially overlooking longer-term sacrifices, like information overload, loss of attention, reduced resilience or misinformation. Therefore, consumer safety can be seen as part of a broader effort to better understand how media environments create value and sometimes costs, for consumers, advertisers and society.”

Findings from her team’s research into why consumers choose products and services beyond purely rational considerations, drawing on the Theory of Consumption Values, suggest that “consumers value media that help them navigate these situations rather than simply maximizing attention.”

“One of the questions we aim to investigate is whether consumers recognize and value advertiser brands that actively support resilient media environments through their media investment decisions,” Wolter said.

That opens up a promising perspective for advertisers. Future research will show how value media investments contribute to advertising impact. Advertisers can also explore how making responsible media choices visible to consumers may turn media placement into part of the brand experience.

Research from Integral Ad Science found that 75% of consumers said they felt less favorable toward brands advertising near misinformation, while 51% said they stopped using a brand after seeing its advertising beside inappropriate content. The environment is not neutral: It shapes how the message — and the advertiser behind it — is received.

Consumers are being asked to separate reliable information from low-quality material at an enormous scale, every day. Trusted media can help lessen that burden through context, editorial accountability and a recognizable standard of evidence.

Trust can help explain why advertising works

Wolter is not suggesting that established media metrics should disappear. “Reach, attention and engagement remain essential because they describe media consumption. The question is whether they are sufficient to explain advertising effectiveness,” she said. “Rather than viewing advertising performance and sustainability as competing objectives, we investigate whether more responsible, value-oriented media planning can strengthen both.”

News media can help illustrate the point. A HarrisX study conducted with Media Impact, Teads and The Trade Desk surveyed more than 11,000 German consumers. It found that ads near quality news, including politics, crime and economics, performed as effectively as ads beside categories traditionally seen as safe, such as business, entertainment and sports. The study found no meaningful brand-safety concerns among the groups examined.

Yet many brands are still avoiding news at the very moment when consumers are most concerned about misinformation. When investment leaves quality journalism, trusted publishers lose resources while lower-quality information has more room to proliferate. That’s not just a loss for publishers. It’s also a loss for the advertisers who are benefitting from appearing next to some of the highest-quality media online.

One advertiser I spoke to recently said it directly: “We do not just want our ads to be seen. We want them to be believed.”

Marketers are beginning to recognize that media quality and a media environment that prioritizes consumer safety are not separate from media performance.

Resilient organizations should invest in resilient media

This leads to Wolter’s bigger challenge for marketers. If businesses are trying to become more resilient, should their media choices reinforce that ambition or contradict it?

A company cannot credibly talk about resilient products, organizations and stakeholder relationships while investing in media that is ephemeral and fleeting, engineered for a quick laugh or burst of inspiration that will be forgotten in a matter of minutes —  before the next piece of content arrives.

Supporting trustworthy media that puts consumer safety first is not separate from a brand’s wider business strategy.

As Wolter put it, “The role of advertisers is to recognize that media investments are also ecosystem decisions.” That is the larger point. The same environments that create value and a safe space for consumers can also create better conditions for advertising to work.

So yes, marketers should still ask: “Did my media investment work?” But two questions should follow: “What did the environment contribute to that result?” and “What kind of media ecosystem did the investment help sustain?”

The next evolution of media planning won't be about performance metrics and brand safety alone. It will be about consumer safety and ensuring the open internet remains a place where trusted journalism, premium content and diverse voices can thrive. 

The Current is owned and operated by The Trade Desk, Inc.