TLDR: Media agencies are increasingly adopting generative AI to significantly reduce the time and cost associated with creating and maintaining brand safety inclusion lists. This technological shift aims to make a crucial but labor-intensive practice more accessible, allowing advertisers to ensure their programmatic ad spend appears only on approved, high-quality publishers and sites.
Media agencies are rapidly embracing generative artificial intelligence to revolutionize the management of inclusion lists, a critical tool for brand safety and suitability in programmatic advertising. This move is driven by the desire to mitigate the substantial time and financial investment traditionally required for these lists, which restrict ad placements to a pre-approved set of publishers and sites.
Inclusion lists are considered a ‘gold standard’ for marketers focused on brand safety, acting as a proactive measure against undesirable ad placements, such as those on Made-For-Advertising (MFA) sites. However, their manual compilation and continuous upkeep have historically made them a costly and time-consuming endeavor. Evelyn Mitchell-Wolf, an ad-tech analyst at Forrester, notes that ‘The amount of effort that it takes to stand one up and keep it up to date is substantial.’ Consequently, despite their benefits, only a significant minority of media practitioners utilize them; Forrester’s Q3 2025 CMO Pulse Study indicates that 42% of U.S. consumer marketing decision-makers employ publisher inclusion lists.
Generative AI is now transforming this process. Tim Lathrop, VP of platform digital at Mediassociates, highlights the dramatic efficiency gains: ‘In the past, you [could have] taken hours doing this. Now, you can essentially build a list within minutes.’ Agencies like Mediassociates are leveraging AI tools, such as ChatGPT, in conjunction with client briefs and up-to-date information from services like The Trade Desk’s OpenSincera. This allows them to compare existing inclusion lists, identify potential gaps, and suggest new publishers for consideration by media buyers and planners. One executive estimated that AI has made the compilation process approximately 30% faster.
This technological advancement is particularly welcomed by agencies committed to inclusion-based strategies. Alexis Faulkner, Chief Transformation Officer at Mindshare, states that the agency is ‘heavily in on inclusion,’ emphasizing the need to differentiate quality inventory from problematic content. ‘There’s some really good quality inventory in there that is still performing, but it gets lumped in with all the shit,’ Faulkner explained. ‘Unless you can use technology to understand that and understand quality signals, not just safety signals, we’re doing a disservice to a whole medium of media.’
Despite the enthusiasm, some skepticism remains regarding the full integration of AI into inclusion list creation. While agencies like AxM, Assembly, and Mediassociates are forging ahead, other media agency executives express caution. One anonymous executive noted their agency uses generative AI for categorizing and sorting publishers within an inclusion list, but not for its initial compilation, stating, ‘It’s a little premature to do exactly what we would hope it could do.’ Concerns also exist about the subjective nature of AI outputs and the need for continued human oversight. Louise Owens, Chief Performance Officer at Kinesso, confirmed that while her agency uses an ‘AI console’ for media planning recommendations, inclusion lists remain a human-reserved responsibility, underscoring that ‘Even with guardrails in place, you’re still putting a lot of trust into the subjective opinion that AI spits out for you. That’s why we still rely on manual and human interaction with the sites listed.’
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Nevertheless, the potential for AI to significantly reduce the ‘toil’ of inclusion list management could lead to wider adoption of this crucial brand safety practice across the advertising industry.
