Brand safety lost its group chat.

What happened around the world

The advertising industry closed a courtroom fight. It did not rebuild the safety net at the centre of it.

On July 29, X and the World Federation of Advertisers said they had settled litigation tied to the now-defunct Global Alliance for Responsible Media, or GARM. Reuters reported that both parties agreed continued innovation in brand safety benefits brands, platforms and consumers. The settlement terms were not disclosed.

WFA also confirmed that GARM, discontinued in August 2024, will not be revived or replaced with a similar program. The voluntary global initiative had created shared tools intended to help advertisers avoid placing ads beside illegal or harmful content.

WFA says those tools reduced harmful ad adjacency from 6.1% in 2020 to 1.7% in 2023. That is the organization’s own reported result. A U.S. federal judge dismissed X’s antitrust claims against WFA and most of the named advertisers in March; the new settlement ends the dispute between X and WFA.

Why your business should care

Brand safety sounds like a multinational problem until your restaurant, clothing label, coaching practice or new release appears beside content your customers find hateful, dangerous or deceptive.

The ad may still deliver impressions. The context can quietly change what those impressions mean. Cheap reach is not cheap if people remember the placement more than the offer—or assume your budget endorses the page around it.

With no shared GARM framework coming back, a platform’s default settings are not a complete policy. Every advertiser needs to decide which environments are unacceptable, which sensitive subjects are still relevant to its audience and who checks the placements after launch.

The KILLER.COOL take

Brand safety should be a business decision, not a panic button.

A platform’s speech policy and your media plan are two different things. People can debate what belongs online; you still choose what your advertising pays to sit beside. That choice should reflect the people you serve, the promise you make and the amount of reputational risk the business can actually carry.

Do not solve the problem with a giant keyword blacklist that blocks legitimate news, creators or culture. Build a brand-suitability standard: firm on illegal and harmful content, precise about sensitive contexts, and flexible enough to recognize when relevance outweighs discomfort.

Put your media plan on safer ground

KILLER.COOL would turn the brand’s values and audience expectations into a usable media policy, map that policy to platform controls, launch controlled tests and review placement reports alongside lead quality—not impressions alone.

Digital strategy defines the risk and the right audience. Paid media and growth puts the controls, exclusions and measurement into practice. Creative direction makes every placement unmistakably yours, so useful attention can build recognition instead of confusion.

The outcome is a media system designed to improve qualified reach, protect trust and move budget toward contexts that help the brand rather than merely tolerate it.