The incentive structures are clear: you do nothing and maybe get fired if your company gets embroiled in a controversy due to the placement of those ads, or you pull your ads and spend that budget in another channel, and worse case nothing will happen to you, and best case you'll be praised for proactive thinking. Woke or not, I'd imagine most people would choose the latter; the former is mostly downside with limited upside.
I'd say that advertisers are in a good place to know whether people do or don't notice what ads are next to content, or vice versa.
I do notice ads and assume some minimal endorsement of content by the advertisers - we are constantly assured that Internet ads are at least demographically targeted.
Of course you don't. You're watching things you're comfortable with and so you have no complaint about an advertiser's association with it.
> I'm pretty sure this is also true for 99.9% of other people. This brand safety stuff is just an excuse for woke marketing staffers to feel like they're "making a difference" by attacking people and companies they don't like.
Holding advertisers accountable for their placement, and distributors accountable for their catalog, predates "woke culture" by well over a century. Most "woke culture" activists in the US grew up seeing it aggressively deployed by "family oriented" activist groups in 1970's - 2000's era and they saw it be extremely effective at influencing what was available on TV, in print, in cinemas, and on music shelves because it threatened revenue and scared capitalists. And those "family groups" learned it from the anti-communists of the post-WWII era, etc, etc.
It's not new, it's not "woke", and history suggests that it does have material impact on media, culture, and business.