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Share on XEvery year, major cultural moments like awards season, the Super Bowl, or March Madness generate headlines, social media buzz, and countless opportunities for advertisers to connect with highly engaged audiences.
But overblocking has been an ongoing issue. For example, this year’s Oscars-related content was often blocked from advertising due to overly restrictive keyword blocklists, causing advertisers to inadvertently cut themselves off from premium inventory.
The consequence of an overreliance on keyword blocklists is twofold: advertisers miss valuable opportunities to engage with audiences, and publishers — especially in the news industry — lose critical ad revenue.
So how can brands strike the right balance, ensuring they remain protected without missing out?
Why major cultural moments matter for brands
Major cultural moments provide a huge opportunity for scale and impact. This year’s Super Bowl, for example, garnered a record breaking 127.7 million viewers, all the while generating widespread buzz across key advertising channels. These “moment in time” events are often as costly as they are critical. The average Super Bowl ad in 2025 cost $8 million for a 30 second spot — and it’s important that these big investments yield big returns.
For advertisers, these events aren’t just about visibility — they’re about impact. They offer a unique chance to align brand messaging with content people are deeply engaged in and emotionally connected to. Whether it’s a highly anticipated film winning Best Picture or a buzzer-beater during March Madness, these moments drive heightened attention and real-time conversation, creating countless opportunities for meaningful ad placements.
The cost of overblocking: What advertisers are missing
For years, keyword blocklists have been the default approach to brand safety. The logic is simple: brands create lists of words associated with risky content — terms like “violence,” “death,” or “shooting” — and prevent their ads from appearing on any pages that include them.
But in practice, this approach is far too blunt.
During the Oscars, for example, entire discussions about critically acclaimed films were off-limits to advertisers. A Best Picture nominee like Emilia Pérez—which tells the story of a cartel boss transitioning to a new life—might trigger blocks due to words like “cartel” or “drugs,” even in the context of positive reviews or industry analysis. The same applies to March Madness coverage: blocking words like “shot” or “shoot” may seem logical for safety reasons, but it also eliminates access to high-interest and timely basketball highlights.
Rethinking brand safety and how to avoid overblocking
Rather than relying on rigid keyword lists, advertisers need a more sophisticated approach that understands the full context of content before deciding whether to block or allow it.
At IAS, we take brand safety beyond single-word exclusions by using AI-powered contextual technology to analyze content at the page level. Instead of automatically blocking a page for containing the word “violence” in the URL, our technology determines the actual context, sentiment, and emotion of the page to understand the true intended meaning.
This level of nuance is essential, especially during major events where engagement is at its peak. When brands use contextual technology rather than static keyword blocklists, they can:
- Avoid missing out on premium, culturally relevant content while still ensuring ads appear in suitable environments.
- Ensure greater campaign efficiency, allowing media dollars to work harder by targeting the right audiences at the right moments.
- Support quality news by enabling trusted news publishers to monetize important stories, rather than inadvertently pushing dollars toward less reputable sources.
The future of brand safety: Smarter, not stricter
Overblocking during major cultural moments isn’t just a missed opportunity — it’s an avoidable mistake. With the right tools, advertisers can stay relevant, maximize reach, and protect their brand without unnecessary restrictions.
As events like the Oscars, Super Bowl, and upcoming cultural events drive public conversations, advertisers have a choice: continue using outdated, overly restrictive blocklists, or embrace a more nuanced, context-driven approach that balances safety with opportunity.
How IAS helps advertisers avoid overblocking without compromising safety
IAS empowers brands to take control of their brand safety and suitability strategies without sacrificing reach or missing critical cultural moments.
With solutions like Context Control, IAS helps brands:
- Maximize premium inventory during major events: Ensure ads appear alongside high-quality, high-traffic content covering events like the Oscars, Super Bowl, and the Olympics, rather than being unnecessarily blocked.
- Reduce wasted ad spend: Avoid the inefficiencies of overblocking, keeping campaigns optimized for reach and engagement without running ads in inappropriate contexts.
- Enhance precision in brand safety and suitability: Instead of blocking pages based on a single word, IAS technology analyzes the full context — differentiating between a movie review, a sports highlight, and genuinely unsafe content.
- Support trusted news and premium publishers: Advertisers can confidently invest in news and entertainment content, rather than unintentionally funneling budgets to lower-quality environments.
- Adapt in real-time to emerging cultural moments: As conversations evolve, IAS solutions continuously analyze and adjust, ensuring advertisers remain agile while maintaining brand protection.
IAS’s Context Control is powered by a proprietary cognitive semantic technology that leverages Natural Language Processing (NLP) to extract page semantics, context, emotion, and sentiment. We offer 280+ vertical and topical segments for content avoidance and 370+ vertical, topical, seasonal, and audience proxy segments for targeting. In addition, IAS has the ability to create brand-specific contextual segments for content avoidance.
Rather than taking a black-and-white approach to brand safety, IAS provides the contextual technology needed to make informed, strategic decisions — allowing advertisers to stay relevant, increase engagement, and drive meaningful results without unnecessary restrictions.
