By Imy Brighty-Potts, Marketing and Content
Blunt-force ad-word blocking is a problem when it comes to hard news, but with the World Cup around the corner, it could be holding brands back when attention is at its highest.
Brand safety has been a hotly contested topic for the past decade, since a Times investigation uncovered instances of prominent brands appearing alongside terrorist content. This exposé led, altruistically, to most digital advertisers adopting word-blocking technology to ensure their brands did not promote harm. However, the mass uptake of blocklists has had unforeseen consequences, with completely safe content often arbitrarily blacklisted due to select words – public-benefit news content during the Coronavirus pandemic being a prime example of this.
As the FIFA Men’s World Cup approaches, this phenomenon is likely to recur. Keywords which will be used time and time again during the World Cup include ‘strike’, ‘attack’, and ‘shoot’ – essential words for a match report, but a fast track to losing prime attention on editorial content if blunt-force word blockers strike down content as unsafe.
A growing bank of research suggests such arbitrary blocklists could be detrimental to brands. In 2025, Bountiful Cow released a report, Relative Advantage: Unblocked. It was both an extensive piece of research into the effectiveness of using ‘unsafe inventory’ and a rallying cry to the industry of the inherent brand safety of newsbrands for advertisers.
Bountiful Cow CEO, Adam Foley, explains: “Blunt ad-word blocking has had a hugely deleterious impact on the news industry as a whole, where journalism of the highest possible standard has been penalised by endless lists of poorly thought through brand safety restrictions. Some newsbrands were unable to monetise their coverage of the Euros two years ago. With the World Cup, advertisers are in danger of leaving some of the best, widest-reaching content on the table if they don't rectify this problem.”
The IAB, meanwhile, has since the days of the pandemic advocated for a more pragmatic approach. According to IAB Europe’s brand safety guidelines, “We do not advocate a blanket approach or overzealous use of keyword blocking.”
As AI revolutionises ad tech practices, there have been calls to move away from strict brand safety guidelines and towards a contextual, agentic layer, where harmful content is still rightly blocked but where LLMs are used to determine whether the context a keyword is used in renders the environment brand safe.
Brand safety guidelines are of course essential, but they should not be applied uniformly. As global football fans descend on North America for the biggest tournament on record, there is a whole world of brand-safe attention at home, from trusted editorial outlets, waiting to be scooped up by advertisers.
