TL;DR: Stellar’s Brand Safety helps brands and agencies identify risky influencer content before a campaign launches. It analyzes textual content across social networks and languages, classifies posts into eleven sensitive categories, and assigns severity scores from zero to nine. Brand Safety is a decision support tool, not an automated exclusion system. It helps teams move faster, avoid PR crises, and make defensible creator choices while keeping humans in control. The article also highlights why tone of voice, audience credibility, and legal compliance matter, including influencer certifications in Belgium and France.
Influencer Marketing Is Riskier Than You Think
For companies running influencer campaigns at scale, brand reputation is under constant pressure. One creator post can instantly reshape how a brand is perceived. That is why fast and reliable brand safety checks have become essential, not optional.
Brand Safety answers a simple question before you sign or launch. Has this creator published content tied to sensitive topics that could put a brand at risk. This includes themes such as threats, violence, sexual content, war, politics, drugs, alcohol, tobacco, and other deeply divisive controversial topics. Even when a post is old, it can resurface at the worst moment and trigger a client escalation or a public backlash.
Trust has become a central factor in consumer decision making, especially when reputation is at stake. According to the 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer, 80 % of people trust the brands they use. This level of trust is higher than trust in business, media, government, NGOs, or even employers among employees. Today, people are looking for something more personal from brands. They want economic hope and personal stability. They expect brands to make them feel safe, calm, confident, and inspired. In this context, the creators a brand works with matter more than ever.
The problem is that manual checks do not scale. Reviewing months of content takes time, and scanning years of posts across platforms is often unrealistic. Teams need a faster and more dependable way to evaluate influencer content before a campaign goes live, especially when timelines are tight and creator lists are long.
This is exactly why Stellar introduces the new Brand Safety feature. It helps agencies assess creator risk efficiently and with confidence by analyzing textual content across social networks and languages, then surfacing sensitive posts with full transparency. As highlighted in our Stellar Tech Trend Guide 2026, brand integrity will be one of the strongest differentiators in influencer marketing.
Brand Safety: How Stellar Flags Content Risks with AI
For brands, the challenge is no longer just choosing the right creator. It is about doing it fast, confidently, and at scale. When trust is fragile and expectations are high, teams need tools that accelerate decisions without lowering standards. This is exactly where Brand Safety fits naturally into the workflow.
Brand Safety is available directly inside Stellar, in a dedicated tab on every influencer profile. From there, agencies and brands can manually launch a brand safety analysis on demand. Once Brand Safety is unlocked, the analysis is automatically refreshed once per day and new posts are included in these daily updates. The system analyzes all available textual content on the creator profile, across every supported social network and in any language. This includes posts from the past, not only recent ones, which is critical when assessing long term reputation risks.
Launching a brand safety analysis is free and included in all subscriptions. The content is then classified into eleven risk categories, including threat, violence including self harm, suicide, and dangerous misuse of medication, sexual content, war, controversial topics, drugs, alcohol, tobacco including vaping and nicotine products, politics, algo speak such as censored words like sx and fck, and missing words. Each detected post can be associated with one or multiple categories.
Each piece of detected content is evaluated on a severity scale from zero to nine. Zero level content is considered safe and does not appear in the results. The Brand Safety score shown on the profile is calculated based on the volume and severity of detected content, helping you quickly assess overall risk. This structured approach allows brands to surface potential risks in minutes instead of hours, and it creates a shared and objective reference point when discussing creator suitability with brand teams.
As Briac Le Guillou, Data Scientist at Stellar Tech, explains:
“Today, brand safety is no longer limited to analyzing captions or hashtags. Risks to a brand can be hidden directly in visual or audiovisual content: settings, objects, visible logos, behaviors, gestures, words, or implicit messages. […] AI can extract text, describe the image, and identify objects. These elements are then evaluated against brand safety criteria defined by the brand (sensitive content, controversial subjects, value incompatibility). The AI then assigns a risk score or alerts, enabling brands to anticipate problems before a partnership or distribution impacts their image.”
For brands, this means Brand Safety is not a black box. It is a decision support tool, not an automated exclusion system. Stellar never automatically blocks or excludes influencers based on Brand Safety results. Instead, it helps you save time, surface sensitive content with full transparency, and support stronger, more defensible conversations with clients. Most importantly, it helps teams move faster while protecting what matters most today: trust, reputation, and brand integrity before a campaign goes live.
Tone of Voice: Match the Creator to Your Brand’s Style
Brand safety alone is not enough. For brands, a creator can be technically safe and still be a poor fit. Tone of voice is what determines whether a message feels right for a brand and its audience.
Every creator communicates differently. Some are educational, others humorous, provocative, activist, or highly personal. When this tone clashes with a brand’s positioning, the result can feel confusing or inauthentic, even if no explicit risk is present. For agencies managing multiple brands, editorial alignment becomes a critical layer of vetting.
Tone of voice helps answer a simple but essential question: does this creator speak the same language as the brand. Not just linguistically, but emotionally and culturally. The way topics are addressed, the choice of words, the level of seriousness or irony all shape how a message is received.
By factoring tone of voice into creator evaluation, agencies and brands can move beyond surface level checks. They can ensure that campaigns feel consistent, credible, and intentional across every touchpoint. This reduces friction with brand teams and increases confidence that the partnership will resonate with the intended audience.
In a context where consumers expect brands to feel human, reassuring, and trustworthy, how something is said matters just as much as what is said. Tone of voice is what turns a brand safe collaboration into a brand aligned one.
Audience Credibility and Legal Compliance: Dig Deeper
A creator can publish perfectly acceptable content and still be the wrong choice. Influence is not only about what is said, but about who listens and under which rules.
Audience credibility is where performance and brand safety intersect. Inflated follower numbers, artificial engagement, or low quality interactions can turn a campaign into a reporting problem very quickly. If the audience is not real, the impact is not real. This makes audience analysis a critical step before any partnership is approved.
Legal compliance adds another layer of responsibility. Sponsored content must be clearly disclosed and follow local regulations. When disclosures are missing or inconsistent, the risk is no longer theoretical. It becomes reputational, contractual, and sometimes legal. Agencies and brands are expected to anticipate these issues, not react to them.
This is also where certification becomes a powerful signal. Working with creators who have completed recognized training helps agencies reduce risk and prove due diligence. That is why Belgium launched its first Influencer Certificate, with Stellar Tech as the exclusive technology partner supporting transparency and professionalization in the market. Just in the beginning of February 2025, the Influencer Marketing Alliance (IMA) announced on LinkedIn that the first 50 creators have successfully obtained the certificate. Within Stellar, all creators certified in Belgium as well as by ARPP in France are transparently displayed and findable thanks to our smart filters.
This is where brand safety moves beyond content moderation. It becomes a system of checks that protects from hidden weaknesses in a creator profile. Audience credibility and compliance help answer two decisive questions. Is this creator genuinely influential and can this partnership be defended with confidence.
This long term vision is also how Stellar sees the future of influencer marketing.
As Sarah Levin Weinberg, CMO and Co Founder of Stellar Tech, puts it:
“The future of brand safety in influencer marketing belongs to those who master the balance: leveraging AI’s scale, speed, and analytical power while preserving human creativity, judgment, and responsibility.”
For brands, this means Brand Safety is not a black box. It is a decision support tool, not an automated exclusion system. Stellar never automatically blocks or excludes influencers based on Brand Safety results. Instead, it helps you save time, surface sensitive content with full transparency, and support stronger, more defensible conversations with clients. Most importantly, it helps teams move faster while protecting what matters most today: trust, reputation, and brand integrity before a campaign goes live.
Smarter Vetting Starts Here: Full Confidence Before You Launch
Brand safety is no longer a single check. It is a process that combines content analysis, tone alignment, audience credibility, and legal awareness. For everyone managing multiple brands and creators at speed, having this clarity upfront changes everything.
With Brand Safety now being part of Stellar, our clients and partners gain a clear and structured view of potential risks before a campaign goes live. Instead of relying on manual reviews or intuition, teams can base decisions on consistent signals, shared data, and transparent analysis. This makes conversations with brand clients easier, faster, and more confident.
Most importantly, Brand Safety supports what matters most today. Protecting trust, safeguarding brand reputation, and enabling long term partnerships. When expectations are high and timelines are tight, having the right tools in place allows companies to move forward without hesitation.
If you want to explore how Brand Safety works in practice and how it can support your agency workflows, our Customer Success and Sales teams are here to help. They can walk you through the feature, share best practices, and help you integrate Brand Safety into your influencer vetting process.
Ready for the probably best brand safety tool?
Talk to our teams to learn how Stellar can help you move faster while staying in control.
This article is brought to you by Stellar
Stellar is a SaaS platform for influencer marketing, developed by the French-Belgian company Stellar Tech and used in more than 43 countries. By using artificial intelligence, including social listening and sentiment analysis, Stellar enables companies to carry out influencer marketing campaigns in a simple and informed manner. The platform helps identify relevant ambassadors, analyse their profiles and target audiences, manage campaigns, and predict and measure the performance and ROI of these campaigns on social networks.
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