Brand-Safety Rate

Brand-safety rate is the percentage of paid impressions that ran in content meeting the advertiser's content-safety policy. The reference standard is the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) framework, maintained by the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), which defines 11 harmful-content categories (Adult & Explicit Content, Arms & Ammunition, Crime & Harmful Acts, etc.) with severity floors and exclusion contracts.

On the web and CTV, brand-safety verification runs through third-party scripts (IAS, DV, MOAT) loaded via OMID. The script classifies the page or video context against the advertiser's policy and reports pass/fail. The fail rate becomes the brand-safety rate; on premium publishers it runs 97%+, on long-tail UGC it can sink below 80%.

On DOOH, brand-safety is structurally simpler because the content adjacency is the venue itself rather than dynamically-served editorial. Buyers can exclude venue categories upstream (no bars for kid-targeted CPG campaigns, no nightclub displays for family brands). Trillboards exposes venue-category targeting through the IAB DOOH taxonomy at /support/developers/dsp-api.

Buyers should treat brand-safety rate as a multiplier on nominal CPM when computing eCPM. An $8 CPM with 90% brand-safety has eCPM-against-safe-impressions of $8.89 — a meaningful difference vs. a $7 CPM with 99% safety.