New Australian-first research: What you need to know about brand safety

Brand safety tools are designed to protect advertisers from appearing alongside harmful or inappropriate content. But when blunt keyword-blocking practices are applied to trusted journalism, they can have the opposite effect unnecessarily excluding legitimate news content and the audiences who engage with it.

ThinkNewsBrands’ latest research report, Beyond Brand Safety: The Trust Advantage – Why context and credibility matter for brands, examines how current brand safety practices are affecting advertising in Australian news media.

The research analysed 1,200 news articles from ten major Australian publishers between July 2025 and June 2026, revealing significant levels of incorrect exclusion and raising questions about how advertisers assess risk across their digital media investment.

“The evidence exposes outdated keyword block lists as a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” said ThinkNewsBrands CEO, Vanessa Lyons. “These lists are supposed to protect brands from appearing near harmful content online, but when they’re applied bluntly to trusted journalism, they do the exact opposite. They are excluding brands from engaged audiences in trusted news environments.”

Beyond Brand Safety key findings include:

• 57% of all news articles contained at least one term capable of triggering an exclusion rule.
  
• 38% of lower-sensitivity news articles were incorrectly excluded by brand safety tools.
  
• 3 in 4 advertising decision-makers regard news as a safe environment for their brand yet only 1 in 3 are confident that brand safety systems make appropriate placement decisions within news.
  
• $180 million in potential advertising opportunity at risk each year due to misapplied keyword blocking.