Brands in Unsafe Places: Effects of Brand Safety Incidents on Brand Outcomes

Abstract

Well-publicized digital media incidents, in which brand content appears adjacent to “unsafe” content (e.g., negative content that is offensive, harmful, or uncomfortable), highlight the potential risk to a brand's reputation every time it advertises on digital platforms. Even as content moderation algorithms improve, brands cannot control digital environments fully, making it imperative for marketing managers to develop brand safety processes to keep a brand's reputation safe within digital advertising ecosystems, among their risk mitigation efforts. The current research accordingly attempts to establish when brand safety concerns are more or less likely to arise, according to specific consumer-, brand-, and incident-related moderators; why consumers react negatively to incidents, depending on their capacity to erode consumer trust in brands; and how and to what extent these combined elements affect various brand-related outcomes. Across data from Twitter (now X) and six experiments, the authors distinguish brand safety incidents from other types of brand risks that demand managerial attention, and they empirically showcase how digital brand safety incidents influence consumers’ attitudes and behaviors, as well as advertisers’ outcomes. Building on these empirical findings, this article provides concrete, evidence-based suggestions for how to mitigate incidents, both before and after their occurrence.