Changes are coming to Display & Video 360 (DV360) in 2025 to improve how advertisers manage their brand suitability settings. These updates are aimed at making it easier for advertisers to apply and control their brand safety strategies. Here’s a simple breakdown of the key changes you can expect:
1. Name Changes for Better Clarity
The term “Brand safety” (used in DV360) and “Category exclusions” (used in YouTube) will be renamed “Brand suitability”. This makes it consistent across different platforms.
2. Advertiser-Level Brand Suitability Controls
Most controls for brand suitability will only be available at the advertiser level, meaning advertisers can set a standard across all their campaigns.
Some controls, including third-party verification, keyword exclusions, and channels or URL exclusions, will still be available at both the advertiser level and line item level.
3. New Setting for Guaranteed Deals
There will be a new feature allowing advertisers to bypass brand suitability settings when making non-programmatic guaranteed deals for non-Google inventory (such as Google Ad Manager and third-party exchanges).
4. Unified Controls Across Platforms
The same brand suitability settings will apply to Display & Video 360, YouTube, and Demand Gen inventory.
This means that settings like “Content categories” and “Excluded content themes” will now also apply to non-Google ad inventories.
5. Removal of Older Filters
“Digital content labels” and “Sensitive categories” will no longer be available for non-Google inventory. These filters will now be managed using “Content categories” and “Excluded content themes” instead.
6. New Brand Suitability Control Names
Several existing controls will be renamed for clarity:
- Inventory modes – Previously “Content categories”
- Excluded content themes – Remains the same
- Content types – Previously “Other content types” (applies only to YouTube & Demand Gen)
- Third-party verification – Previously “Other verification services” (available at both advertiser and line item levels)
- Keywords and Channels & URLs – Still available at both advertiser and line item levels
What This Means for Advertisers
These updates make managing brand suitability easier by ensuring settings are applied consistently across different platforms. Renaming controls and consolidating settings at the advertiser level will simplify campaign management while still allowing flexibility for exclusions when needed.
For more details, refer to the original article.