The Future of Brand Safety is Cultural Safety

Saying we can reach multicultural audiences as part of a general market strategy is inaccurate.

Let that sink in.

The truth is that emerging suppliers are often unmeasured by verification partners and the way that programmatic media bought and planned does not take cultural context into account. Let’s explore.

Programmatic advertising has a brand safety problem to explore, but not the one you’re thinking about; brand safety has traditionally ignored a very simple question. If the content of the website is trusted by the individual seeing an ad, isn’t this impression inherently safe? By relying on the pipes and traditional brand safety solutions, advertisers are attempting to complete a puzzle without knowing if all the pieces are there. The future of brand safety in part will come from innovation in cultural safety.

The Limits of Traditional Brand Safety

Brand safety as a category has evolved significantly over the last decade, with the IAB, GARM, MRC, and other leading bodies and agencies/advertisers leaning in as well; additionally, you could say we’re in an era of optimism regarding transparency in programmatic increasing rather than further obfuscation being the norm. Where brand safety frameworks by these bodies, and advertisers as well, have a very real need – is the addition of cultural safety. Cultural safety in advertising exists when the audience is exposed to an ad in an environment they trust, that feels representative of their cultural/communal identity.

Why Cultural Safety

An understanding of cultural safety is required to avoid suppressing, penalizing, or further marginalizing voices and identities from diverse backgrounds. Over 40% of the US population identifies as Black, Hispanic, or Asian. Figures vary but estimates of the % of digital advertising dollars spent on multiculturally owned publishers has been widely calculated at between 2% and 5%. Publishers, Ad Tech, Agencies, and Advertisers all have a role to play in the disparity between population and investment; however, when explored in the context of how programmatic has evolved over the last decade we can learn something interesting.

Programmatic buyers have often relied on a few methods:

Buying open web supply with exclusions and algorithmic filtering (predictive viewability, brand safety, brand suitability, etc.)

Buying direct from publishers or a limited number of trusted partners via PMP/PG

With the first buying method the lack of cultural nuance is complicated by traditional verification partners not having measured emerging publishers, and dollars will tend to flow towards publishers that send the right signal to the DSP (we can handle tons of volume). This is a system setup for scale, not outcomes.

With the second buying method the main factor limiting multicultural investment being that investment is tied directly to buyer awareness and willingness to test multicultural/inclusive publishers or leadership directives.

New publishers need to adhere to the latest metadata standards laid out by IAB/MRC frameworks so that verification partners can properly identify and contextualize their contents to the best of their abilities, but it is incumbent upon the ad tech ecosystem to provide that proper cultural context for true brand safety. Algorithms perceive scale as their north star in DSPs, and herein lies the main problem advertisers face: the system is setup to facilitate a strategy along the lines of “let’s run ads and see what publishers perform, optimize from there and start to lean into the top performers” however; most emerging publishers will never be seen by a buyer so the strategy itself becomes flawed.

Said another way, until traditional verification partners make cultural intelligence a core capability, supply (Ad Tech, Publishers, SSPs) will need to bridge the gap and buyers will need to lean in.

Over the next several weeks, we’ll be releasing more of our POV on Cultural Safety and how Cultural Intelligence as a category within digital advertising is crucial to monitor in 2026. Reach out to Gantic to discuss how we can work together.