Ahead of the Brand & AI Safety Summit London 2026, which takes place on September 17, 2026, at Sea Containers London, NDA speaks to Rob Rasko, CEO, The 614 Group and President of The Brand Safety Summit to find out more…
The Summit has rebranded from “Brand Safety” to “Brand & AI Safety.” What’s driving that shift, and how much of this year’s London agenda will be dedicated to AI-specific risks versus traditional brand safety and suitability issues?
AI is driving everything here. Close to a trillion dollars has been invested in AI infrastructure, and a lot of that money is coming from the same companies, including Google, Meta, TikTok, as well as newer entrants like Anthropic and OpenAI. We’ve been in this business long enough to know how that investment eventually gets monetized: advertising. So if you want that money to actually flow into our ecosystem, you have to take brand safety and this newer category of AI safety seriously. AI safety in advertising covers the new threats AI introduces, but it also covers the new tools and solutions. That’s the lens for this year’s agenda: not just AI as a risk, but AI as part of the toolkit.
You’ve expanded the Summit Series into Dubai and grown its presence in Singapore and New York alongside London. What is London telling you that other markets aren’t, and how does the UK’s regulatory environment shape the conversations you’re having there?
A big part of what we do is connect the world around conversations that matter. London has always been an important market for us because so many global brands, agencies, platforms and technology companies have a significant presence there. That same thinking has shaped how we’ve expanded the Summit Series more broadly,
We expanded into Singapore specifically because companies and agencies want a platform where they don’t have to travel to find their counterparts, they can find them there. That’s also why we’ve started running smaller events inside our agency partners’ headquarters, alongside the bigger flagship events. It’s all in service of the same goal: giving our partners a bigger footprint to connect and build community, wherever they are.
Marketers have been promised “brand safety solved” more than once over the past decade. What’s genuinely different about the tools and standards available in 2026, and where is the industry still kidding itself?
“Brand safety solved” is the wrong way to talk about this, full stop. Brand and AI safety are forever evolving, they’re never a finished project. What’s actually different in 2026 is that brand and AI safety have become part of everything. You can’t have a conversation about healthcare advertising without it: how healthcare advertisers think about patient care, data protection, regulation, and protecting their brand in that context, that IS a brand safety conversation, even if it isn’t always labeled that way. So this year in London, we’ve restructured the event around verticals instead of leading with “brand safety” as the headline. Healthcare is a headline. Financial services, sports, commerce, and creators are headlines. Brand safety tech and tools still gets its own track, that’s the catchall for companies building the technology itself, but we wanted something broader. More diverse speakers, more diverse audience. By pulling those threads together, people aren’t just learning from the core brand safety world, they’re learning from every corner of the industry that touches marketing and figuring out, in real time, what “brand safe” actually means for their category.
With generative AI now producing a growing share of content, and ads increasingly served alongside AI-generated material, how should brands be rethinking suitability frameworks that were built for human-made content?
Generative AI and how it affects advertising is a major thread this year, and honestly, it has to be. It’s everywhere: your social feeds, your search results, even CTV. Figuring out what’s real versus what’s AI slop is exactly the kind of problem the next generation of tools and technology needs to solve, and we’ll have the companies building those solutions on stage telling us how. We’re a forum first. Our job is to bring the most cutting-edge thinking into the room, and this conversation is too present, too unavoidable, not to have it front and center.
Who do you see as the most important voices in the room this year? Is there a topic or tension you expect to dominate the discussions in a way that might surprise attendees?
The most important voices in the room are the marketers, full stop. They’re the ones dealing with all of this in real time, right in their face, while they’re trying to run their business, grow revenue, and adapt to constant change. There’s a lot happening: geopolitical shifts, technology changing under their feet, new companies emerging seemingly overnight. Marketers have to absorb all of that while still protecting their brand. So how they’re navigating it, specifically within their own verticals, is really the spine of how we’ve built this year’s program. We want to hear what they’re thinking and doing, and we’ve got a lot of marketers leaning into this journey with us.
Looking beyond this year’s Summit, what does success look like for brand safety as a discipline five years from now? Is the industry’s current approach (verification vendors, third-party measurement, platform self-policing) built to get there?
If the AI revolution has proved anything, it’s that the canvas never stops changing. AI keeps bringing new mediums into media, and five years from now, this will still be an ongoing conversation, not a solved one. What will keep evolving are the tools, the technologies, and the solutions. What won’t change is that advertisers will always care whether their ads show up in the right place, consumers will always care about their experience online, and platforms and agencies will always care about what both of those groups think. Wherever the ad dollars flow, whoever controls those dollars will keep making decisions about adjacency, and there will always be a conversation about what “good adjacency” means for a specific brand. That conversation just looks different in financial services versus healthcare versus sports versus retail. So our job isn’t to solve it in five years. It’s to keep servicing that conversation, vertical by vertical, for the long haul.
