Digital marketing trends food and beverage brands cannot ignore in 2026
The specific 2026 digital marketing trends most relevant to food and beverage brands, prioritised for visual discovery and retail media coordination.
5 min read
Brand safety in programmatic advertising — ensuring ads do not appear alongside harmful, inappropriate or simply low-quality content — remains a genuine, ongoing concern given how automated, wide-reaching programmatic ad placement inherently is.
Why this risk persists despite improved tooling
Programmatic advertising's automated, high-volume nature means ads can appear across a vast range of content, including some that poses genuine brand safety risk, faster than manual review could ever keep pace with — making automated controls essential, not optional.
- Automated ad placement operates at a scale manual review cannot realistically match.
- Content categorisation tools are imperfect, meaning some risky content evades automated filtering.
- New harmful content emerges continuously, requiring ongoing filter updates rather than a one-time setup.
Brand safety filtering is not a one-time setup you configure and forget — it is an ongoing control that needs the same regular attention as any other part of a live advertising campaign, precisely because new risky content keeps appearing.
Practical dual-layer controls
- Pre-bid filtering to exclude known categories of unsuitable content before an ad is even placed.
- Post-campaign placement audits to catch content the pre-bid filter missed and refine future filtering.
- Working with programmatic partners that offer transparent, verifiable brand safety reporting.
Connecting brand safety to the made-for-advertising problem
Brand safety concerns overlap meaningfully with the programmatic waste issues covered elsewhere, since low-quality, made-for-advertising sites often carry both wasted spend and elevated brand safety risk together.
Frequently asked questions
How often should brand safety placement audits be conducted?
Regularly, at least monthly for active campaigns, given how quickly new content and inventory can appear within a programmatic ecosystem.
Do all programmatic platforms offer meaningful brand safety controls?
Most major platforms offer some level of control, though the sophistication and transparency of reporting varies meaningfully — evaluating this specifically when selecting a programmatic partner is worthwhile.
Is brand safety risk higher on certain types of inventory?
Generally yes, open-exchange inventory tends to carry higher brand safety risk than curated, premium inventory, which is a relevant consideration when balancing reach against risk.
If you want help implementing effective brand safety controls for your programmatic advertising, talk to our team.
The takeaway
Implement both pre-bid brand safety filtering and regular post-campaign placement audits — relying on only one of these two controls leaves a genuine gap that the other is specifically designed to catch.
Written by Fibvo — Bengaluru and Erode, India — working with clients in other time zones. Questions, or think we have it wrong? Tell us.
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