GARM Advertising: What Brand Safety Costs You

GARM advertising refers to the brand safety and suitability standards developed by the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, a cross-industry initiative that set out to define what kinds of content advertisers should and should not appear alongside. When GARM dissolved in 2024 following an antitrust lawsuit, it left a gap that the industry has been quietly arguing about ever since: not whether brand safety matters, but who gets to define it, and what the commercial cost of getting it wrong actually looks like.

For senior marketers, this is not an abstract policy question. It sits at the intersection of media planning, platform relationships, and growth strategy, and the decisions made here have measurable consequences for reach, relevance, and revenue.

What Was GARM and Why Did It Matter?

The Global Alliance for Responsible Media was formed in 2019 under the World Federation of Advertisers. Its stated purpose was to create a shared framework for brand safety across the digital advertising ecosystem, covering everything from hate speech and misinformation to illegal content and graphic violence. Major platforms, agency holding groups, and advertisers all signed up. The idea was that if the industry could agree on what “unsafe” meant, media buying decisions could be made with more consistency and less guesswork.

In practice, GARM produced a set of tiered content categories, ranging from content that should never carry advertising to content that might be suitable depending on context and brand. It gave procurement teams and CMOs a defensible framework to point to when a campaign ended up somewhere embarrassing. And it gave platforms a set of standards to claim compliance against, whether or not the underlying enforcement was strong.

In August 2024, GARM announced it was shutting down after X (formerly Twitter) filed an antitrust lawsuit alleging that the alliance had coordinated an advertising boycott. The legal specifics are still being argued. What is not in dispute is that the industry’s shared reference point for brand safety is now gone, and every major advertiser is handling that absence in their own way.

If you are thinking through how this fits into your broader go-to-market approach, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers the commercial decisions that sit around media planning, audience strategy, and growth investment.

Brand Safety vs. Brand Suitability: Why the Distinction Matters

One of the more useful things GARM did was try to separate brand safety from brand suitability, even if the industry often collapsed them back into a single conversation. They are genuinely different problems.

Brand safety is about avoiding content that would cause reputational damage regardless of context: hate speech, child exploitation, terrorism. No serious advertiser wants to appear there. The threshold is relatively clear, even if enforcement is inconsistent.

Brand suitability is more nuanced. It is about whether a piece of content is the right contextual fit for a specific brand, even if it is not objectively harmful. A beer brand might reasonably want to avoid content about addiction recovery. A children’s toy brand probably does not want to appear in a true crime podcast. But a cybersecurity company might be perfectly comfortable advertising alongside news coverage of a data breach. The same content can be suitable for one brand and unsuitable for another.

When I was running agency operations and managing significant media budgets across multiple verticals, the challenge was never really the obvious stuff. Nobody was accidentally running ads next to terrorist content and calling it a media planning error. The real problem was the middle ground: the keyword exclusion lists that blocked anything mentioning “death” or “crisis” or “accident,” which meant a life insurance brand could not appear in news coverage that was directly relevant to why someone might need life insurance.

That is not brand safety. That is anxiety dressed up as strategy.

The Commercial Cost of Over-Blocking

The advertising industry spent years building increasingly sophisticated keyword exclusion lists, and the result was a system that blocked a substantial portion of premium news inventory from receiving advertising. Publishers covering serious topics, from politics to health to financial markets, found themselves demonetised not because their content was harmful but because automated systems flagged words that appeared in their articles.

For advertisers, the commercial cost is real but often invisible. When you exclude a keyword category, you do not see the impressions you missed. You do not see the audiences you failed to reach. You see a clean brand safety report and a campaign that delivered against its targets on the inventory it was allowed to access. The counterfactual is invisible.

This is a version of a problem I have seen throughout my career in performance marketing. Earlier in my career, I overvalued lower-funnel signals because they were measurable. The clicks, the conversions, the return on ad spend figures all looked compelling. What I was not accounting for was how much of that activity represented demand that already existed, people who were going to buy anyway, and how little of it was actually creating new demand. The same logic applies to brand safety over-blocking: you optimise for what you can measure (brand safety incidents avoided) and ignore what you cannot (reach and relevance foregone).

Growth requires reaching new audiences, not just capturing existing intent. Market penetration depends on getting in front of people who are not yet in your funnel, and excessive brand safety restrictions make that harder by concentrating spend in a narrower and narrower band of “safe” inventory.

What the Post-GARM Landscape Actually Looks Like

Without GARM, advertisers are doing one of three things. Some are maintaining the same exclusion lists they had before, treating the GARM framework as a de facto standard even though the organisation behind it no longer exists. Some are revisiting their brand safety settings with fresh eyes, using the dissolution as an opportunity to recalibrate. And some are doing nothing, which is its own kind of decision.

The platforms themselves have not stood still. Most major programmatic environments now offer their own brand suitability controls, and third-party verification vendors like IAS and DoubleVerify have moved to fill the standards gap with their own category taxonomies. The practical effect is that brand safety is now more fragmented than it was under GARM, with different definitions operating across different platforms and verification partners.

For media planners, this fragmentation creates both risk and opportunity. The risk is inconsistency: a campaign that is “safe” according to one platform’s controls may not be “safe” by another’s definition. The opportunity is that advertisers who invest in building their own brand suitability frameworks, calibrated to their specific brand, audience, and commercial context, can operate with more precision than those relying on industry-wide defaults.

The Forrester intelligent growth model has long argued that sustainable growth requires alignment between brand investment and commercial outcomes. Brand safety decisions that systematically reduce reach are a growth problem, not just a compliance problem.

How to Build a Brand Safety Framework That Is Commercially Grounded

The most useful thing a marketing team can do right now is treat brand safety as a calibration exercise rather than a binary restriction. Here is what that looks like in practice.

Start with your actual risk tolerance, not the industry default. The GARM framework was designed to work across all advertisers, which meant it was calibrated to the most risk-averse participants. Your brand is not every brand. A financial services company operating in a regulated environment has different constraints than a direct-to-consumer brand selling kitchen equipment. Define your own thresholds based on your brand values, your audience, and your regulatory context.

Audit your exclusion lists against your reach data. Most media teams can pull reports showing what percentage of available inventory their exclusion lists are blocking. If that number is above 40 or 50 percent, you are almost certainly blocking content that would be perfectly acceptable for your brand. The question is not whether any individual exclusion is justified, but whether the cumulative effect is commercially rational.

Separate your safety floors from your suitability preferences. Some content should never carry your advertising, full stop. Other content is a judgment call that depends on context. Keep these two categories distinct in your planning. The first category should be non-negotiable and tightly defined. The second should be reviewed regularly and adjusted based on evidence, not anxiety.

Test into news and current affairs inventory. This is the category that has been most aggressively blocked by brand safety tools, and it is also some of the most contextually engaged inventory available. If your brand has been avoiding news environments entirely, consider running a controlled test with appropriate verification in place. The results often challenge the assumption that news is categorically unsafe.

Build internal accountability for brand safety decisions. In many organisations, brand safety settings are configured once and never revisited. The person who set up the exclusion list in 2021 may have left the company. The settings persist. Assign ownership, set a review cadence, and make sure someone is accountable for the commercial consequences of those decisions, not just their defensive value.

The Platform Relationship Problem

One of the less discussed dimensions of the GARM situation is what it revealed about the relationship between advertisers and platforms. The antitrust lawsuit filed by X alleged that GARM members had coordinated to withhold advertising from the platform, effectively using brand safety as a proxy for content moderation pressure. Whatever the legal merits of that argument, it points to a real tension.

Advertisers have legitimate commercial interests in where their ads appear. Platforms have legitimate interests in not being subject to coordinated advertiser pressure that functions as de facto censorship. These interests are not always compatible, and the absence of a shared industry framework makes the negotiation between them more fraught.

I have been in rooms where platform decisions were driven more by PR risk management than by genuine commercial analysis. A brand pulls advertising from a platform because a journalist asks them about it, and suddenly the media planning team is scrambling to justify a decision that was made in communications, not in strategy. That is not brand safety. That is reactive reputation management masquerading as principled media planning.

The more commercially grounded approach is to make platform decisions based on your own assessment of audience quality, content environment, and commercial return, with brand safety as one input among several rather than the primary driver. Go-to-market execution has become more complex across every channel, and platforms are no exception. Treating them as either categorically safe or categorically unsafe misses the nuance that good media planning requires.

What This Means for Upper-Funnel Investment

Brand safety restrictions have a disproportionate effect on upper-funnel activity. The content categories most commonly blocked by keyword exclusion lists, news, current affairs, politics, health, tend to be the environments where engaged, attentive audiences spend time. Restricting access to those environments concentrates spend in entertainment and lifestyle content, which may be less contextually relevant for many brands.

This matters for growth because upper-funnel reach is where new audiences are built. Someone who encounters your brand in a contextually relevant environment is more likely to form a meaningful association than someone who sees a retargeted ad for the fourth time. The analogy I keep coming back to is retail: someone who tries something on in a store is far more likely to buy than someone who walks past the window. Getting people into the fitting room requires reaching them in the right context, not just in the safest one.

Brands that have systematically avoided upper-funnel investment in the name of brand safety often find themselves over-reliant on lower-funnel performance channels, capturing existing demand rather than creating new demand. Growth tools and tactics can help with optimisation, but they cannot substitute for the audience-building work that brand advertising does when it is allowed to reach people at scale.

The BCG research on brand strategy and go-to-market alignment makes a similar point: brand investment and commercial performance are not in competition. They compound each other when the media strategy is coherent. Brand safety decisions that systematically undermine reach are a drag on that compounding effect.

Thinking about how brand safety decisions connect to your broader growth architecture? The Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers the strategic frameworks that sit around media investment, audience development, and commercial planning.

The Measurement Problem

One of the reasons brand safety decisions are so difficult to challenge internally is that the costs are largely invisible. You can measure brand safety incidents: ads appearing next to objectionable content, keyword adjacency violations, platform-level brand safety scores. You cannot easily measure the reach you did not get, the audiences you did not build, the brand associations you did not form because your exclusion list was too aggressive.

This asymmetry creates a systematic bias toward over-restriction. The downside of appearing next to unsafe content is visible, attributable, and potentially embarrassing. The downside of over-blocking is diffuse, slow-moving, and invisible in any individual campaign report. Procurement teams and risk functions will always push toward more restriction because the costs of under-restriction are more legible than the costs of over-restriction.

The answer is not to abandon brand safety controls. It is to build measurement frameworks that make the cost of over-blocking visible alongside the cost of brand safety incidents. That means tracking reach metrics, audience quality scores, and contextual relevance alongside brand safety compliance, and holding the media planning function accountable for the full picture rather than just the defensive half of it.

When I was judging the Effie Awards, one of the consistent patterns in the work that performed best commercially was that it had reached genuinely new audiences, not just optimised delivery to existing ones. The campaigns that won on effectiveness had made deliberate choices about where to appear, and those choices were driven by audience strategy rather than risk avoidance. Brand safety was a consideration, not the primary filter.

Where Brand Safety Goes From Here

The post-GARM landscape is unlikely to produce a single replacement framework. The antitrust concerns that brought GARM down have made the industry cautious about any coordinated approach to advertiser behaviour, and platforms have their own incentives to resist external standards that constrain their monetisation.

What is more likely is a continued proliferation of platform-specific controls, third-party verification standards, and brand-level frameworks, with individual advertisers making their own calibration decisions rather than relying on an industry default. That is a more complex operating environment, but it is also a more commercially rational one for brands that invest in building genuine expertise in this area.

The brands that will do this well are the ones that treat brand safety as a commercial discipline rather than a compliance function. That means having clear definitions of what safe and suitable mean for their specific brand, auditing those definitions regularly against reach and effectiveness data, and making deliberate choices about where to appear rather than defaulting to exclusion as the path of least resistance.

Building the organisational agility to make those decisions quickly and confidently is a competitive advantage. The brands that are still running 2021-era exclusion lists in 2026 are leaving reach on the table, and in a market where audience attention is increasingly expensive to buy, that is a cost that compounds.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

Frequently Asked Questions