Brand Safety vs. Brand Suitability: What’s the Difference?

Podcast advertising is one of the fastest-growing opportunities for brands to connect with highly-engaged audiences. With 158M Americans ages 12 and up tuning in to podcasts monthly, it’s a channel no business can afford to overlook (or underestimate).

But as podcast consumption and ad spend rises, so does the importance of ensuring that your ads are running in brand-safe environments. This is where brand safety and brand suitability come into play. 

While these two concepts are often used interchangeably, they serve different purposes. Understanding their distinctions can help you refine your podcast advertising strategy, ensuring your brand messaging lands in the right spaces with the right audience. 

What Is Brand Safety?

Brand safety ensures that advertisements appear in environments free from harmful or inappropriate content. It’s about avoiding risk. For example, no brand wants their ads running alongside explicit, illegal, or misleading content. It’s a baseline requirement for advertisers to protect their image and maintain consumer trust.

Why Is Brand Safety Important?

Without brand safety, your advertising could inadvertently appear alongside content that damages your reputation. Working with a publisher or network partner that ensures brand safety shields your message from inappropriate or harmful associations, ensuring your audience perceives your brand as trustworthy and reliable. Typically, this looks like a publisher complying with industry standards and adhering to a brand safety floor. 

What Is Brand Suitability?

While brand safety prevents your ads from running alongside harmful content, brand suitability ensures your ads align with content that matches your brand’s goals, values, and target audience. It’s all about answering the question, “Was my ad aligned with brand-appropriate content?” Through brand suitability, you ensure your message reaches listeners who are most likely to engage in a favorable and meaningful way. But remember, what’s suitable for one brand may not be suitable for yours. 

The Targeting Solutions to Adopt 

Podcasts are a safe environment for any brand’s messaging, and we take this a step further by removing content that doesn’t meet our brand safety baselines—protecting both our listeners and advertisers. To ensure your ads play in the right genres and shows for your brand and target audience, we offer different types of targeting solutions to optimize your ad placement. 

Category targeting: With category targeting, your ads appear in podcasts whose topics align with your brand’s industry or interests. For example, an athleisure brand could reach wellness-loving millennials on a sports or health-focused podcast.

Contextual targeting: Contextual targeting uses keywords and themes within podcast episodes to determine suitable placements. This ensures alignment with specific interests your audience cares about, enhancing relevance and engagement.

Predictive audience targeting: By using AI-powered tools, predictive audience targeting zeroes in on audiences based on over 300 predictive behaviors, from TV-viewing to purchase intent, resulting in boosted ad relevancy. This approach is ideal if you’re looking for a specific consumer without having to rely on traditional identifiers. 

How Does Brand Suitability for Podcasts Compare to That for Music?

Podcasts and streaming audio platforms both fall under the digital audio umbrella, but their brand suitability considerations differ. For starters, music has been on the scene longer than podcasts. The majority of brands are already comfortable with the medium due to its creative nature and listeners’ independence in self-selecting their content. If your brand has specific needs in aligning suitability standards to music, targeting solutions like genre and audience will do the trick. 

Working with Third-Party Vendors and Maintaining Industry Certifications

We’re not just serious about audio—we’re serious about brand safety and suitability. That’s why we partner with trusted, third-party vendors and meet rigorous industry standards (and continue meeting them). 

Barometer

Prebid suitability targeting: In partnership with the third-party vendor, Barometer, pre-bid suitability targeting takes brand suitability a step further by evaluating and securing appropriate ad placements on podcast episodes—all before the bidding process even begins. This proactive approach guarantees high-quality matches for your ads. 

Brand suitability measurement: In collaboration with Barometer, we offer a way to measure the brand suitability of your podcast campaigns at the episode level. When you run measurement pixels on a campaign, Barometer measures the suitability and safety of that targeting, giving brands a true measure of success. Plus, with mid-campaign reporting available, you can make real-time optimizations to improve performance.

IAB Certified

We’re the only audio publisher that’s IAB Data Transparency Certified, which is 3.8x more accurate than other publishers. And we understand that there’s no “set it and forget it” to certifications. As industry standards evolve and change, we evolve and change with them, having been IAB Podcast Measurement certified again in 2024. 

Get Started with SiriusXM Media

We’re committed to giving your brand a safe and suitable environment to connect with the listeners who matter most on the content they listen to most. From offering robust brand safety and suitability measures to advanced targeting solutions, we provide brands with the tools and confidence to excel in podcast and streaming audio advertising.

Ready to elevate your digital audio advertising strategy? Let's talk.

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