How customization, control and accountability are reshaping the way advertisers think about context

The industry is now entering a third phase, where brands expect more control, more extensibility into walled gardens and closer accountability to outcomes.

Customizable parameters

Platform policies and industry frameworks provide a baseline, but they are too broad to capture the needs of individual advertisers. When brands rely solely on these third-party definitions, the result is often underblocking and overblocking. Campaigns can end up excluding valuable and relevant environments while still running against content that does not align with brand values. That outcome hurts both advertisers, who miss opportunities, and publishers, who lose access to spend based on a misclassification of their content.

In practice, suitability varies by product, audience and geography. A pharmaceutical marketer, a toy company and a beer brand will not share the same thresholds. Global advertisers face an additional layer of complexity as cultural expectations shift from one region to another.

The answer is customization. Recent research from Annalect and Channel Factory showed that campaigns built with brand-defined suitability deliver measurable performance benefits: Advertisers leveraging customized suitability achieved almost six times the return on ad spend on YouTube, outperforming general online video campaigns by up to 80%. Brands need tools that allow them to set their own standards, adjust them across categories and markets, and refine them over time. Lists of blocked or approved sites have existed for years, but they are blunt and labor-intensive. The focus now is on flexible parameters that empower brands to define suitability without carrying the manual burden.

Extending suitability into UGC and closed platforms

Another marker of this new phase is the expectation of suitability controls within user-generated walled gardens and closed ecosystems. Walled gardens such as YouTube, TikTok and other major social platforms have historically limited the transparency and control available to advertisers. Their policies were designed to protect audiences broadly rather than individual advertisers.

That is beginning to change. As these platforms evolve, brands increasingly expect the same level of customization and accountability within walled gardens that they experience on the open web. Extending suitability into these platforms is essential, given how much audience attention they command and how central they are to modern campaigns. Advertisers want the ability to define and apply their own suitability parameters, even within closed ecosystems, ensuring that brand values and messaging integrity are maintained across every platform.

Accountability to performance

The third characteristic is accountability. Brand safety is fundamentally about compliance, avoiding adjacency to harmful or illegal content. Suitability, by contrast, goes further because at its core it’s about strategic alignment. It ensures that a brand’s message appears in environments that reinforce its identity and resonate with its audience.

Treating suitability as a box-checking exercise misses its real value. Ads that run in contexts aligned with brand values are more effective. They reach people in a more receptive state of mind, leading to stronger engagement and measurable sales impact.

Independent studies have shown that campaigns designed with brand-defined suitability deliver higher return on investment. In fact, the Annalect and Channel Factory study quantified this link between suitability and sales, revealing that online media optimized for brand suitability delivers 64% higher efficiency than offline, and nearly doubles the ROAS compared to average media buys. By redefining suitability as a performance lever rather than a compliance task, brands can connect contextual integrity with business outcomes, turning relevance into a measurable advantage.

Brand-led suitability

Safety, suitability and, now, customization mark the progression of how advertisers manage context. Each stage has added more nuance and more responsibility to a brand’s role. Platforms and industry bodies will continue to provide baselines, and agencies and technology partners will continue to help with execution. What is or is not safe is very black and white. But the responsibility for defining what is safe and suitable has migrated to the brand.

This shift has turned suitability from a box to be checked into a strategic function that begins with the advertiser and shapes the entire media plan. Brands that embrace what suitability can deliver, contextual relevance, emotional alignment and performance accountability will gain a competitive edge. Those that remain reliant on generic standards will continue to face the same limitations and controversies that defined the earlier era.

Partner insights from Channel Factory