5 Things You Should Know About Brand Safety in News

Caution around News content has always been part of advertising strategy. But increasingly, what began as a strategy has hardened into habit.

The concern itself is understandable. Brand safety is a real concern, and the stakes are high: 82% of consumers hold brands responsible for where their ads run, and a poor adjacency can do genuine damage to how a brand is perceived. No one wants their product appearing next to content that contradicts its values.

But the response to that risk, broad exclusions and category-level avoidance, has a cost that often goes unexamined. News is one of streaming’s most reliable, high-attention environments. Its audiences are engaged. Its inventory is growing. And the brand safety risks that have made it a category to avoid are, under close scrutiny, far more specific and manageable than the blanket policies often designed to address them.

Here are five takeaways from Wurl’s latest CTV Trends Report that marketers should consider when thinking about brand safety in News.

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1. News covers a wide range of content

What gets labeled as “News” is, in reality, a broad category capturing a remarkable variety of content. Business desk segments. Local weather. Foreign policy analysis. Human-interest features. Cooking segments wedged between the midday headlines. Even within a single program, the emotional register can shift from gravity to warmth within a few minutes.

This variability is exactly where broad brand safety strategies fall short. There’s a difference between a segment on mortgage rates and a live report from a conflict zone, both of which might air in the same hour, on the same channel. 

The reality is that brand safety in News depends heavily on the specific moment, not just the channel or genre.

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2. A significant portion of News inventory is brand safe

When analyzed at the scene level,35.7% of News content met full brand safety criteria across standard IAB-aligned categories. In other words, more than a third of News is fully suitable for advertisers.

The challenge in News has never really been a shortage of safe inventory. It’s been a shortage of tools to find it.

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3. Risk in News is concentrated and predictable

Risk in News isn’t evenly distributed. It clusters, and it does so in ways that are largely intuitive.

The majority of brand safety flags are driven by a handful of categories tied to real-world events: Death/Harm (43% of available impressions), Violence (31%), War and Conflict (31%), and Firearms (20%).

Just as important is what’s relatively absent. Profanity, sexual content, and derogatory language, categories that often drive advertiser anxiety across the broader media landscape,  appear in just 2–3% of News scenes. In some cases, these rates are comparable to or lower than non-News content.

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4. Broad brand safety controls are leaving value on the table

Genre- and channel-level exclusions were never elegant solutions. They were available solutions — practical, fast to implement, and explainable to nervous stakeholders. While effective at avoiding adjacency to sensitive content, these tactics often go too far—eliminating large amounts of viable inventory along with the riskier segments.

That tradeoff is more significant than it might appear. News accounts for roughly 8.6% of FAST viewing hours and delivers consistent engagement, with spikes during major events that drive scale and attention. But the reach implications go deeper than aggregate share.

Some households don’t just watch News occasionally – they watch almost nothing else. Devices where News makes up 90% or more of all viewing account for 7.4% of total FAST hours across the platform. These are effectively news-only households: TVs that are on, engaged, and tuned almost exclusively to news content. For advertisers who exclude News entirely, these households don’t just become harder to reach, they become unreachable. No other genre will get you there.

And those are audiences worth reaching. News environments are associated with stronger brand recall and higher levels of consumer trust.¹ Advertising alongside credible journalism can enhance how audiences perceive a brand, creating a halo effect that’s increasingly difficult to replicate elsewhere.²

Avoiding News may feel like a safe choice. But it often means leaving performance, reach, and perception gains on the table.

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5. Brand safety is evolving—from avoidance to precision

The way brand safety is assessed is starting to catch up with how content actually works.

Instead of evaluating entire programs or channels, newer approaches analyze content at the scene level – analyzing what’s happening immediately before an ad is served. This allows advertisers to align with suitable moments within News, rather than making binary decisions about the category as a whole.

The implications are significant. Advertisers no longer have to choose between scale and safety, or between reach and control. With greater precision, both become possible.

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The case for a second look

News on FAST isn’t a risk to avoid. It’s an opportunity to unlock.

As streaming ad budgets expand, advertisers are under more pressure to find environments that can still deliver attention, reach, and credibility at scale. News offers all three. And with better tools for evaluating content at a more granular level, marketers no longer have to rely on broad exclusions that cut them off from valuable audiences altogether.

For many brands, the hesitation around News is less about current reality and more about old habits. The advertisers willing to rethink those assumptions may end up reaching viewers their competitors continue to overlook.

The data behind all of this is in Wurl’s 2026 CTV Trends Report Go deeper on scene-level brand safety data, News viewership patterns, and what it means for your media strategy. [Access the report]

¹ Research Live, “Traditional news increases advertising attention, eye-tracking research finds,” 2024.
² News Media Alliance, “Advertising in News: Trust and Brand Equity,” 2024.