99% of Programmatic Ads Are Brand-Safe … But Positive Sentiment Still Lags. Can AI Help?

New benchmarks from the Association of National Advertisers found that an overwhelming majority (99.1%) of programmatic inventory occurs in “low-risk environments.”

That’s the good news, according to MediaPost’s Joe Mandese.

“The bad news,” Mandese says, “is that less than half (45.5%) the advertising buys are associated with ‘positive’ brand sentiment, although the majority were ‘neutral’ and only 1.6% were ‘negative.’”

(Source: ANA’s Programmatic Transparency Benchmark: Q3 2025 Benchmark Findings)

These findings, shared in ANA’s Q3 2025 report entitled Programmatic Transparency Benchmark, should boost confidence about the majority of programmatic advertising inventory being “safe and contextually appropriate,” something that had been a concern when MFA (Made For Advertising) sites were more prolific. The decline in median share of web ad spending on MFA inventory, from 0.75% in Q2 to 0.40% in Q3, “[underscores] the industry’s progress toward cleaner supply chains.”

“With AI-powered contextual analysis and sentiment scoring, marketers can now achieve scale without sacrificing brand safety or integrity.”