GARM Brand Safety Floor + Suitability Framework

The Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) is an industry first effort that unites marketers, media agencies, media platforms, industry associations and advertising technology solutions providers to safeguard the potential of digital media by reducing the availability and monetization of harmful content online. These steps are essential to create a safer digital media environment that enriches society through content, communications and commerce.

Harmful content and its creators threaten the potential for digital media and disrupt the connections everyone seeks. Our first step in safeguarding the positive potential for digital is to provide platforms, agencies, and marketers with the framework with which to define safe and harmful content online.

Our position is that you cannot address the challenge of harmful online content if you are unable to describe it using consistent and understandable language.

GARM has developed and will adopt common definitions to ensure that the advertising industry is categorizing harmful content in the same way across the board. These 12 key categories have been identified in consultation with experts from GARM’s NGO Consultative Group. Establishing these standards is the essential foundation needed to stop harmful content from being monetised through advertising. Individual GARM members will adopt these shared principles in their operations, whether they are a marketer, agency or media platform.

The Brand Safety Floor + Suitability Framework is intended to provide the following:

1. A common understanding of what harmful and sensitive content is via content categories;
2. A common understanding of where ads should not appear, as expressed in a Brand Safety Floor;
3. A common way of delineating different risk levels for sensitive content, as expressed in a Brand Suitability Framework.

This document was first published in September 2020, with the June 2022 version  including a new category for Misinformation.

The GARM Brand Safety Floor + Suitability Framework can be downloaded below: