Brand Safety Guidelines

The Globe and Mail, as well as our Alliance partners, are all safe and suitable advertising environments, but we understand that certain topics are more of a concern for some brands and their campaigns. 

As a news site, sensitive topics will be covered to provide readers with the balanced, informative and timely journalism they expect from us. Please feel confident that we will not be serving any of your ad impressions outside of our BRAND SAFE Globe Media properties

How do we avoid unwanted ad adjacencies for our clients?

We work with a technology partner that allows us to understand the topic and context of an article, and make this information targetable for ad delivery, in real time. 

All of our direct IO and PG impression-based display ad products have a pre-defined brand safety key applied that, by default, excludes content that falls into these categories/topics: 

terrorism | sex | sexual offence | racism | disasters | casinos and gambling | crime | mental health | substance abuse | violence | hatred | diseases and conditions | war and conflicts | Islamic fundamentalism

If there are additional brand safety requirements for your campaign, please connect with your Account Manager to discuss further options. Keep in mind that the creation of new brand safety targeting can take up to five business days depending on the complexity.

What about third-party brand safety tracking?

We also allow for the use of verification tags to track brand safety, however, they should be set to monitoring only. 

If blocking tags are a requirement for your campaign, we require an ad response 100% of the time to ensure we are not serving blanks across our sites. 

We will require a written confirmation that either an alternative creative or PSA creative will be served in the "blocked" impression before going live with any blocking tags. “Blocking” ad impressions can only be used for tracking purposes on your end .

If we come across blank creative being served across our sites after this confirmation, we will be required to halt the campaign until further updates are made. 

We bill on actual delivery based on the final numbers within our ad server.  Therefore, we will be tracking delivery and invoicing based on all ad calls on our side, regardless if the impressions fall outside of your verification parameters.