Understanding the GARM Brand Suitability Definitions

Brand Suitability, by its nature, differs for each brand. It became a common umbrella term for a myriad of content types that certain brands and industries wanted to avoid.

With the GARM standards, it became clear that “risk” levels needed to be defined in order to help make informed decisions on suitability tolerances. In order to define risk, the GARM categories outline very specific definitions across low risk, medium risk, and high risk categories — so that both the buy-side and the sell-side can speak from the same playbook.

This shared Brand Suitability framework, activated by the IAB Tech Lab’s industry wide taxonomy, offers transparency for GARM participants in the responsible consideration of sensitive content within the context of consumer safety. It delineates different risk levels for sensitive content within each of the 11 categories. It also establishes guidelines by which media platforms can sanction exceptions that are deemed to still meet the GARM mandate of responsible speech and public interest.

For each of the defined 11 content categories, the Brand Suitability Framework categorizes each into three different levels of risk: High Risk, Medium Risk, and Low Risk. Low Risk categorization covers Educational, Informative, Scientific and news content related to each topic. Medium Risk categorizes the content into the context of entertainment and breaking news/Op-Ed coverage. High Risk content involves the glamorization or gratuitous depiction of each topic. This framework provides advertisers with enhanced control to understand the various degrees of sensitive content.

In practice, brands can now choose between different categories of risk for their Suitability pre-flight, with content level examples of how the definitions are translated to the channel. We’ve summarized examples below to see how it translates to a category like Online Piracy — which beyond obviously pirated content, also has tiered risk associated with it.

To learn more about Zefr and our involvement with GARM, visit our website.