When you look back on 2025, what stands out in your mental timeline? Tariffs, major acquisitions, landmark antitrust rulings? It was a year fraught with controversy and cultural shifts, and to top it off, Merriam-Webster’s word of the year was slop, defined as “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.” The ocean of online media grows ever deeper and murkier, and as technology and consumer behaviors evolve, marketers will be forced to continually rethink how they protect brand integrity while driving performance.

Forrester’s Latest Research On Balancing Risk, Relevance, And Return On Investment

In 2026, marketers will need to stay agile when it comes to brand safety and suitability, and we’ve designed a suite of essential research to help sharpen your approach. To build or bolster a holistic, resilient brand safety strategy:

  1. Understand where marketers and consumers stand. Brand safety is inherently dynamic, shaped by platform and vendor offerings, cultural context, and regulatory priorities. Most marketers had to adjust their brand safety strategies in 2025, and there were a few public snafus. Still, marketers remain confident of the tools available to bring those strategies to life. The State Of Brand Safety, 2025 provides a data-rich view of current trends and perceptions, examining how B2C marketers are implementing brand safety practices and how consumers perceive those efforts. This foundation is critical for aligning risk management with audience expectations.
  2. Adopt a strategic framework to protect and enhance brand image. With an overwhelming volume of content uploaded every second, marketers need more than basic safeguards. A layered contextual strategy enables brands to avoid risky ad placements while actively seeking environments that enhance relevance and performance. Forrester’s Contextual Strategies Hierarchy Of Needs Framework outlines a three-tier model for achieving this balance, complete with best practices for implementation. This framework helps marketers move beyond reactive measures to build proactive strategies that align brand safety with business outcomes.
  3. Explore the business logic behind brand safety controls. Brand safety has grown increasingly complex as audience fragmentation and policy changes reshape the digital landscape. Not all platforms approach it the same way. Large players such as Meta deprioritize brand safety because their scale and proven performance retain advertiser spend regardless of content moderation protocols. Smaller platforms and open web publishers, by contrast, position brand safety as a key differentiator to win ad budgets. The Economics Of Brand Safety unpacks the rationale behind these decisions, illustrating how scale, media performance, and competitive pressures influence the role of brand safety in platform strategies.

These reports provide a comprehensive brand safety baseline so that brands can start asking the right philosophical and tactical questions. For personalized guidance, schedule a guidance session with me to discuss how these insights apply to your media strategy and brand safety goals.