What is Digital Media Safety?

In a world where digital investment keeps growing, a new field is quietly but strategically emerging: Digital Media Safety. Still largely unstructured, this discipline is quickly becoming essential for any business relying on digital to grow.

What is Digital Media Safety?

Digital Media Safety refers to the set of practices, technologies, and systems that help secure the execution of digital media campaigns by identifying, preventing, and correcting critical errors that can compromise results. In other words: it’s risk management applied to media activation.

Why now?

Because the numbers speak for themselves:

• In 2024, digital advertising spend in France reached €10.97 billion (+14%), according to the SRI ePub Observatory report (Feb. 2025).

• 79% of active advertisers invest in digital (source: BUMP annual report based on data from Kantar Media, IREP, and France Pub).

• 80–90% of operational errors in companies are human, according to various studies, including the OSH Wiki on Human Error.

In this context, each mistake, whether it’s overspend, tracking bugs, or poor targeting, can cost tens or hundreds of thousands of euros, distort KPIs, derail strategy, and damage client trust.

It’s time to act, to implement effective risk management policies and treat this as a collective responsibility.

A gap to close

Most industries improve performance by integrating control, governance, compliance, or risk management functions. 

In finance, no operation is launched without an alerting system.

In industry, every critical process is monitored.

So why should digital media, where millions are committed monthly, operate without real-time execution oversight? The burden placed on traders, consultants, and media teams is too great for the limited resources at their disposal.

What’s at stake with Digital Media Safety?

Digital Media Safety goes far beyond budget protection. It now covers a range of key risks:

• Financial risk: overspend, undetected budget leaks, loss of client trust or contracts

• Performance & control risk: blind algorithms, poor targeting, pacing errors, tracking issues, distorted reporting, bad recommendations

• Human risk: overload, stress, confidence loss, burnout, recruitment challenges

What are the solutions?

Digital Media Safety can be implemented through multiple layers:

training, processes, cross-checks, validation workflows, scripts, and alerting systems, whether manual or automated.

The goal is always the same: catch errors early to correct them fast and avoid incidents that impact budgets and operations.

WATCH40: a pioneer in Digital Media Safety

WATCH40 was designed to offer a concrete, innovative response to this growing structural need. It’s an autonomous, automated platform for continuous supervision of media activations that enables you to:

• Automatically detect critical errors and anomalies, powered by data and machine learning

• Alert the right teams in real time, at the right level

• Document and track incidents to improve over time and strengthen organizational resilience

Digital Media Safety: the next digital standard

Digital Media Safety shouldn’t be a luxury or an add-on. It needs to become a standard for any advanced media strategy. Because in a world where execution is just as critical as strategy, failing to manage risk means being exposed to it.