Brand Safety & Suitability in Podcast Advertising: A Guide

Jun 17, 2025

For the uninitiated, podcasts may seem like the wild west of the content world, where anyone might say anything, and anything goes. This misconception makes some brands hesitant to hop on the podcast bandwagon. Even those in the know may still rule out entire genres for fear of jeopardizing brand safety. But rest assured. Podcast advertising is just as safe as other media. Not only is illegal or highly egregious content removed from content, but brands also have a say in the level of content suitability they want their ads running alongside. With over two in three Americans being monthly podcast listeners, this medium has become impossible to ignore.

Let’s dig into brand safety, brand suitability, and—most importantly—how to find the right content for both your brand and your target audience.

Learn the Brand Safety Floor

There is a baseline for content on the SiriusXM Podcast Network; it’s the brand safety floor. In accordance with IAB guidelines, the brand safety floor ensures both our listeners and advertising partners aren’t exposed to damaging content. On the back end, this means we have industry-approved filters in place that remove content to ensure we’re adhering to the brand safety floor. Our content team also regularly monitors and removes content from monetization when it’s deemed inappropriate. This is your brand safety baseline, ensuring your ads will never play alongside content that is either illegal or extremely harmful.

Now that we know that there is no safety risk to podcast advertising, let’s look at brand suitability, which determines what environments are uniquely appropriate for your brand.

Tailor Two-Tier Brand Suitability to Your Needs

Brand suitability is all about the environment your ads play in, based on your brand values and situation, and adopting a strategy is incremental to brand safety. While all content on our podcast network is brand safe, they’re not all suitable for your brand.

We split brand suitability into two tiers:

Level 1 (limited): The content is intended to be educational or informative about a topic and is appropriate for young children. It’s the podcast equivalent of a family-friendly network.

Level 2 (standard): The content is appropriate for everyone in the family and falls within the context of entertainment or breaking news. It’s the podcast equivalent of network TV.

Think Targeting, Not Anti-Targeting

You may be tempted to stick to level one suitability, thinking it’s the safest (and therefore best) option for your brand. But take a second to think of the content—and audiences—you could be missing out on. Like the graphic below, the content opportunities narrow as the suitability bar rises.

When you’re deciding what brand suitability in podcast advertising looks like for your brand, first think about the audiences you want to reach. Who are they? What kind of content do they enjoy? Then think of how you can marry suitability with audience targeting to reach your ideal audience.

Let’s look at a hypothetical example. A fitness company wants to reach a health-conscious, female audience and has expressed some suitability concerns with podcasts. After learning about the brand safety floor for our podcast network, they find that this effectively addresses their expectations and alleviates concerns. Next, it’s about homing in on our targeting tools to reach their audience.

More Targeting Tools Than Ever

You can use contextual transcription targeting to apply brand suitability controls down to the episode level. This targeting tool allows you to focus on specific topics that align with audience interests across millions of episodes translated and mapped to IAB Content Taxonomy segments. You can also layer advanced solutions to target specific publishers, genres, and audiences. For even greater control over how your ads appear at the episode level, lean on Barometer’s pre-bid suitability targeting approach—a major win for programmatic podcasting. Brands can evaluate podcast content in real time before it becomes available for programmatic bidding, ensuring your ads only run in environments that meet your unique suitability criteria.

Remember our hypothetical example from above? The fitness company can take it a step further and select specific genres, inventory sources, and audiences that align with their brand and campaign goals. Then they can add in contextual transcription targeting to reach their health-conscious audience. This targeting strategy allows their ads to run on any type of content, even true crime, which is popular among women. Simultaneously, the advertiser avoids episodes covering more sensitive topics. With the myriad of targeting solutions available today, podcast advertising options are more strategic, connections to audiences are deeper, and ad experiences are even more personalized.

Your Best-In-Class Podcast Partner

To recap, podcast advertising is as risk-averse as ever. And when it comes to ensuring brand safety and brand suitability, the SiriusXM Podcast Network is the best around. We’re the first movers in brand suitability targeting for podcast advertising, pushing the industry forward.

Ready to explore brand suitability for your brand? Let’s talk.