News U.K. rethought brand safety, and is starting to profit from it

“We’ve created more ad inventory that we know is brand safe,” said Charlie Celino, head of strategic development at News U.K, without revealing exact figures.

But this wasn’t just about unlocking ad space that had been wrongly flagged as unsafe, it was a full scale rethink of how News U.K. approached brand safety.

Instead of relying on tagging built for keyword blocklists that often lead advertisers to take an overly cautious approach to advertising around news, the publisher sought a more nuanced system. The results, according to the News U.K., speak for themselves: the number of brand safety categories the publisher had available to advertisers grew by more than 37% in 2024 compared to the previous year.

“We had a vendor that was over-sensitive, shall we say in the way it applied brand safety in certain instances as in there were times when it didn’t really understand great nuance in some types of content such as the difference between fictional crime and an actual crime event,” said Celino.

That’s where Illuma comes in. Its AI-powered contextual tool Nucleus Narr(ai)te assesses both the context of an article and the nuances of each publication’s style across The Sun, The Times, The Sunday Times and talkSPORT. It reviews content tags, sentence structure and categorical context such as sports, entertainment and personalities, pushing brand measurement beyond the industry’s typical blunt-force keyword blocking. 

This more nuanced classification system has also fine-tuned audience segmentation. It gives marketers a more precise understanding of content feeds directly into a sharper read on audience interests, leading to a 10% increase on average in segment accuracy, and in excess of 24% for categories like beauty and health, according to the publisher. 

Looking ahead, News U.K. plans to move beyond simply validating segment accuracy. The focus will shift to proving whether these segments drive attention or lift key metrics like brand awareness. Eventually, these efforts may even go beyond articles to other content formats, including podcasts and CTV. 

As Celino put it: “We’re now in that next phase of capacity and exploration of being able to append even further data signals to the contextual and brand safety application that Illuma provides us.”

Striking the right balance between safety and scale 

More brand safe inventory, smarter categorization and better targeted ads — it all adds up to a more profitable approach to digital advertising for publishers like News U.K. One that keeps less ad revenue locked up in blunt brand safety tools struggling to keep pace with culture and how it spreads online. 

“There’s a perfect storm around brand safety at the moment in terms of technological advancements and key industry trends around the application of it given it hasn’t been reviewed for years plus the fact that publishers are being pushed to not be so beholden to technologies beyond our full comprehension,” said Celino. 

Of course, skeptics will say this is just another case of a media owner grading its own homework. And they’d be right. But News U.K. isn’t forcing anyone to use the tool. Marketers are free to bring their own brand safety vendors — they just might not get the same results. 

“We are not trying to impose our own ad verification or our own brand safety onto advertisers,” said Celino. “In fact, the way we’ve worked with some of our longer-standing partners is to complement their keyword blocklists or encourage them to be updated.”

Brand safety in flux

These efforts come as major platforms like Meta and X take a more hands-off approach to governing the amount of divisive content on their platforms. Publishers like News U.K. see this as another reason for advertisers to shift more spend their way instead. Whether that bet pays off remains to be seen. 

“There are some businesses making decisions around the loosening of their brand safety applications, or they’re changing into more community led propositions,” said Celino. “We’re coming at this issue from a stance of how we can deliver better campaign effectiveness for advertisers in a way that also makes for a better experience for our readers.” 

Building on Celino’s point, the brand safety industrial complex has become a high-stakes game of screenshot roulette. One letter, one tweet, one out-of-context report and marketers are in the crosshairs of customers, CEOs and even politicians. Advertisers are naturally spooked. The mere suggestion that their brand appeared somewhere questionable is enough to send them scrambling. That paranoia has splintered brand safety into a tangled mess, forcing marketers and publishers to rethink their playbook.

“The fact that publishers are taking steps to protect and defend the quality of their content is positive, but much more needs to be done,” said Alessandro De Zanche, founder of media consultancy ADZ Strategies. “Agencies are covering themselves with outdated approaches and tools that, so far, almost no one has questioned. By doing so, they miss huge opportunities and limit their clients’ ability to display ads alongside quality content. Advertisers are not pushing their agencies hard enough to do more and do better.”