AI-Enabled Brand Safety
AI-enabled brand safety doesn't just prevent your ad from appearing next to inappropriate content. Increasingly, it prevents someone from using AI itself to impersonate your brand in a fraud scheme.
“Brand safety is no longer just about where your ad appears. It's also about whether that voice that sounds like your CEO in a video is really him.”
Otto GTM ObservatoryFrom ad placement to protection against impersonation
Traditional brand safety focused on avoiding ads appearing next to inappropriate or reputation-damaging content. With the spread of increasingly accessible synthetic generation tools, the perimeter has expanded to a more serious risk: malicious third parties using AI to create plausible fake content impersonating executives or the brand itself, often in fraud schemes.
A proactive approach requires continuous monitoring of mentions and suspicious synthetic content, along with already-defined verification protocols (official denial channels, authenticity confirmation process) ready before an incident occurs, not improvised during the crisis.
Anti-patterns
Common mistake: limiting brand safety to traditional ad placement control, without extending it to monitoring unauthorized synthetic content impersonating the brand or its executives.
Second mistake: having no pre-defined verification protocol to confirm the authenticity of official communications, leaving customers and partners without a clear channel to verify whether suspicious content is genuine.
Practical Application
A company establishes an officially verified channel publicized in advance (a dedicated page with direct contact to confirm suspicious communications) and active monitoring of synthetic content mentioning the brand. When a fraud attempt emerges with the CFO's cloned voice, the company publicly denies it within 2 hours using the channel already known to customers, versus an average of 24-48 hours observed in similar incidents without a prepared protocol.