How to Be Brand-Safe Without Losing What Made People Follow You

I have creators with hundreds of thousands of followers who cannot get a brand deal. And it's not because they're not talented.

I manage sex workers, comedians whose humour gets flagged by every platform, and people whose mouths run a hundred miles an hour. Their audiences show up specifically because of those things. But when it comes to brand partnerships, those same qualities become the obstacle.

So the question becomes: how do you stay brand-safe without losing the spark that built your following in the first place?

What "Brand-Safe" Actually Means

Before anything else, it helps to understand what brands mean when they use this term, because it gets thrown around a lot without much explanation.

Brand safety, as defined by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), is the practice of protecting a brand's reputation by avoiding placements where content is considered harmful, misleading, or inappropriate for general advertising. In creator marketing, that expands beyond a single post. Brands are vetting your past content, your current content, and your foreseeable future content for anything that might be deemed offensive, extreme, or off-tone for them.

There's also a related concept worth knowing: brand suitability. The difference matters.

Brand safety is the hard floor. Don't put my ad next to hate content, explicit material, or misinformation. These are objective-style rules that apply regardless of the brand.

Brand suitability is softer and more subjective. Does this creator's overall feel match our values, tone, and audience? This is where a lot of creators get quietly filtered out, not because they've done anything wrong, but because they don't fit the vibe a brand is trying to project.

Understanding the difference helps you figure out which one is actually working against you.

Your Following Matters Less Than You Think

Here's something I've noticed working between creators and brands: your follower count matters less than how brand-safe you're perceived to be.

From a brand's perspective, a creator partnership is an extension of their brand. Whoever they pair with reflects on them. So a creator with 80k followers who produces clean, consistent, on-brand content will often get the deal over someone with 500k followers whose content is harder to predict.

Sex workers will mostly land partnerships with sex toy brands. Comedians might get something tied to their live show. The foul-mouthed ones are hoping a brand stumbles across the one video where they didn't drop fifteen F bombs.

If you set out from the start to build a monetisable platform and kept it accessible, the deals come in easier. Fitness creators, lifestyle creators, parent bloggers. The category signals brand suitability before a single pitch is made.

But a lot of creators never planned to have a following this size. It just happened. And now they're sitting on a platform that was built for connection and reach, not brand integration. That's a different problem, and it needs a different approach.

The Environment You're Working In

If you're a creator in Australia, you need to understand the room you're pitching into.

The default decision-maker at most Australian brands, if they were a person, would be a cis Anglo man in his fifties who plays golf on weekends and considers a woman talking about her period a bit much. That is not a caricature. That is the reality of where a significant portion of marketing budgets still sit.

And that environment is not neutral. It has consequences.

A 2021 study by MSL and Influencer League found a 29% pay gap between white influencers and BIPOC influencers overall. When looking specifically at Black influencers versus white influencers, that gap widens to 35%. A disproportionate share of Black influencers are clustered in the nano and micro tiers, under 50k followers, where average annual brand income sits around $27,000. Meanwhile, a much larger share of white influencers sit in the macro tier, where earnings are closer to $100,000 and above.

A 2023 academic study on the pay gap in influencer marketing found something even more telling: while average payment per post showed no significant difference, Black influencers experienced 26% higher income volatility. The reason was that Black macro-influencers were frequently hired for the moment, during periods of heightened racial-justice attention, rather than brought on as long-term partners. The same work, less stability.

That pattern extends beyond race. Neurodiverse creators, creators who work in industries the mainstream deems inappropriate, creators who express emotions that Australian culture tends to read as too much, all of them face a version of the same headwind.

This is worth naming clearly: if you are a minority creator in Australia, you are starting further back. That is not a reflection of your talent or your value. It is a structural reality of the industry as it currently exists. I think Australia will catch up eventually, because boring does not hold attention and audiences are getting younger. But for now, it is harder, and pretending otherwise does not help anyone.

None of which means you stop. It means you go in clear-eyed about what you're working against, and you build accordingly.

So What Do You Actually Do?

Find a format that can hold a brand without feeling forced.

If your content is social commentary, figure out how a brand could live inside that naturally. If you do day-in-my-life content, what does a brand integration look like that doesn't kill the pacing? Work on the format first, without a brand in mind. Then think about which brands could slot in without the audience noticing the seam.

Back brands you love for free at first.

I know that's not what most people want to hear. But doing a genuine, unpaid integration with a product you actually use gives you two things: proof of concept and footage. Brands seeing you work with other brands, paid or not, tells them you know how to do it. They start imagining themselves in your content. Proof is everything when you're pitching cold.

Let the results speak.

If the format performs, if people click, if the engagement holds up compared to your other content, you now have something concrete to bring to a conversation. Numbers matter, but so does demonstrating that your audience responds to branded content without checking out.

Do not gut your personality to chase deals.

Your audience will feel it immediately. The creators I've seen lose traction fastest are the ones who softened everything the moment a brand came knocking. You can censor yourself to an extent. You can read the room. But you cannot become someone else and expect the same people to stay.

The Longer Game

The industry is changing. The people who will be running brand marketing in five years grew up on TikTok and are not the golf guy. What brand-safe means is going to shift with them, and a lot of what gets penalised today will be considered an asset tomorrow.

But you still have to operate in the market that exists right now, not the one that's coming.

So find the version of your content that can hold a brand without holding it awkwardly. Build a track record before you need one. And when the deals do come, make sure the person showing up to deliver on them is still actually you.

The creators who last are not the ones who made themselves palatable. They're the ones who figured out how to be themselves and commercially viable at the same time. That gap is smaller than the industry wants you to believe.

Sources: MSL / Influencer League, "Time to Face the Influencer Pay Gap" (2021); "Black-White Pay Gap in Influencer Marketing," academic study (2023); Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), brand safety framework.