Brand safety refers to measures taken to protect a brand’s reputation by avoiding placements in environments that are illegal, harmful or damaging. This includes avoiding legal content that is violent, hateful, or otherwise inappropriate. The goal is to prevent any association with content that could negatively impact all brands’ reputations and images.
ISBA has a long history of working with industry bodies, the government and the wider ecosystem to promote best practice and raise awareness of media placement issues to brands. For instance, ISBA drove the development of cross-industry brand safety guidance when ad placement adjacent to illegal and unsafe content became the focus of UK media coverage in 2017.
ISBA regularly develops and publishes industry guidance with its members and cross-industry. This is often then fed into the Media Services Framework which members and their suppliers such as agencies, use to set the parameters of their agreements.
The Brand Safety chapter of our Responsible Media Guide contains more information of guidelines and best practice, and is available here.
If you are an ISBA member with any questions about ensuring the safety of your brand online contact Stephen Chester or Dan Larden.
As an independent trade body, ISBA does not endorse any position taken, or not taken, by any other bodies we reference or include guidance from in this section. It remains the sole discretion of ISBA members whether to follow their recommendations.
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Stephen Chester
Stephen Chester
Steve has spent the last 18 years of his career in the digital advertising industry.
He’s the Director of Media for ISBA, leading a team delivering industry education, standards, research and shaping and campaigning for effective, responsible industry self-regulation across all media platforms on behalf of marketers. He is also a permanent member of the Joint Industry Committee for Web Standards (JICWEBS) overseeing digital trading standards for the UK including brand safety, viewability and ad fraud.
Prior to ISBA, Steve spent 5 years as Director of Data & Industry Programmes at the Internet Advertising Bureau in the UK leading a team covering Display, Search & Data, 8 years at Microsoft Advertising leading a variety of account management/client service teams and 4 years as Head of Operations at Agency.com, a leading full service digital marketing agency.
Dan Larden
Dan Larden
As Head of Media, Dan supports ISBA members across a range of ongoing initiatives that are transforming the role of advertisers in shaping the evolving addressable media ecosystem. He will work directly with members to build out fresh strategies providing UK advertisers with leading and advanced resources to help them navigate emerging trends and structures.
Dan has over 14 years’ experience in advertising and was most recently Chief Strategy Officer at TPA Digital, a specialist consultancy giving impartial advice to brands on data driven digital advertising. Before switching to consultancy, he was a Managing Partner at Infectious Media (now Kepler), which pioneered the use of programmatic advertising in the UK.
At ISBA, Dan leads industry initiatives around Media Insight & Effectiveness, Programmatic & Performance and Data & Ethics for the UK’s leading advertisers who make up ISBA’s membership.
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