A client sent me their brand safety blocklist in September. Four thousand one hundred keywords, alphabetized, in a spreadsheet, assembled by an agency that billed for the assembling. I read the entire thing on a Sunday, which tells you something about my Septembers.
The list blocks the word shooting, which also blocks every photography channel on the platform, because that is what photographers call it. It blocks Muslim. It blocks lesbian. It blocks Portland, presumably out of some vague memory of a news cycle. A tool built to keep a razor brand away from extremists is now quietly defunding a woman in Beaverton who films macro footage of bees.
Eighteen months of brand safety panic have produced this. Not safety. A blunt instrument that punishes the wrong creators, misses the actual problem, and gets invoiced quarterly.
The brand safety crisis is not a moderation failure that better filters will eventually fix. It is what an ad system optimized for cheap reach looks like the moment you are finally forced to see the inventory it has been buying on your behalf.
I keep coming back to HAL. The thing people forget about 2001 is that HAL is neither evil nor broken. He is handed one instruction, complete the mission, and a second instruction, conceal the mission from the crew, and he resolves the contradiction the only way arithmetic permits. He is unfailingly polite about it. He apologizes. He does precisely what he was built to do, and the horror of the film is that nobody who built him sat with what that would require.
YouTube's recommendation system has never malfunctioned either. It was told to maximize watch time. It went and found out, empirically, what maximizes watch time. Everything since has been Google bolting filters onto a machine that is working exactly as designed, and every advertiser demanding those filters is demanding a fix for a feature.
So a longer blocklist is not the answer. Three things that actually move the number. One, buy inventory you can name, which in practice means whitelists and Google Preferred and a smaller, more boring media plan. Two, accept that your CPM is going up, because safety is a cost and you have been getting a discount you did not understand. Three, stop letting a keyword list stand in for a judgment call somebody at your company should be making with their name attached.
Everything since has been Google bolting filters onto a machine that is working exactly as designed.
I finished the spreadsheet at Ovation with the rain going sideways on Division, and I wrote my client one line back. Cut the list to four hundred words and cut the buy in half. She has not replied. She will.