Neal Thurman — Co-Founder & CEO at Brand Safety Institute

Neal Thurman serves as Co-Founder and CEO of the Brand Safety Institute (BSI), an organization he helped establish to professionalize and standardize brand safety practices across the digital advertising industry. BSI was founded with the mission of educating and certifying advertising professionals in brand safety principles, creating a recognized credential — the Brand Safety Officer (BSO) certification — that helps brands, agencies, and platforms demonstrate competency in protecting brand reputation in digital environments. Thurman's leadership has been central to building BSI into a recognized industry body that bridges the gap between advertiser concerns and the technical realities of programmatic advertising. Under Thurman's guidance, BSI has developed partnerships with major industry stakeholders including publishers, ad tech platforms, agencies, and trade organizations. The institute operates as a neutral, educational entity focused on raising the overall standard of brand safety knowledge across the ecosystem. This includes curriculum development, thought leadership, and convening industry leaders around shared challenges such as misinformation adjacency, made-for-advertising (MFA) sites, and contextual suitability standards. The significance of Thurman's role at BSI reflects a broader industry recognition that brand safety is not merely a technical checkbox but a strategic discipline requiring dedicated expertise and governance. As programmatic advertising has scaled and the complexity of the open web has grown, the need for credentialed professionals and institutional frameworks around brand safety has become increasingly important to advertisers, agencies, and platforms alike.

Thurman's continued leadership at BSI has meaningful implications for the AdTech ecosystem, particularly as brand safety evolves from a reactive concern into a proactive, standards-driven discipline. BSI's certification programs create a talent pipeline of professionals who understand the nuances of brand suitability, contextual targeting, and adjacency risk — skills increasingly demanded by major advertisers as they scrutinize where their media dollars flow. This institutionalization of brand safety knowledge helps elevate industry-wide practices and may influence how platforms, DSPs, and SSPs develop and communicate their safety toolsets. BSI's neutral positioning allows it to serve as a convening body across otherwise competitive players, which is rare and valuable in a fragmented ecosystem. As regulatory scrutiny of digital advertising increases and advertiser trust in programmatic channels remains a persistent challenge, organizations like BSI — led by experienced figures like Thurman — play a growing role in shaping norms, influencing policy conversations, and providing accountability frameworks that the broader market increasingly demands.