Media agencies look to AI to reduce inclusion list toil

"For marketers with a keen eye on brand safety and suitability, inclusion lists are something of a gold standard. And like gold, they're expensive. Increasingly, media agencies are using generative AI to reduce the lift associated with inclusion lists. "In the past, you [could have] taken hours doing this," said Tim Lathrop, vp of platform digital at Mediassociates. Now, he added, "you can essentially build a list within minutes.""

"When an advertiser uses an inclusion list, it restricts programmatic spend to a list of publishers and sites. It's the inverse of an exclusion list, which simply removes publishers a marketer doesn't want to spend with. In theory, this ensures ad spend only goes where it should - and insures against nasty MFA shocks. In practice, it's a time-consuming - and therefore expensive - measure."

""The amount of effort that it takes to stand one up and keep it up to date is substantial," said Forrester ad-tech analyst Evelyn Mitchell-Wolf. As a consequence, it's a practice used by a significant minority of media practitioners. Per Forrester's Q3 2025 CMO Pulse Study, 42% of U.S. consumer marketing decision-makers use publisher inclusion lists. Given the volume of marketers' brand safety concerns, some media buyers see inclusion lists as one of the only ways to spend open web inventory while satisfying client concerns."

Inclusion lists restrict programmatic spend to preapproved publishers and sites, serving as a strict brand-safety and suitability control. Inclusion lists require substantial manual effort to create and maintain, making them time-consuming and expensive. Generative AI tools are increasingly used to automate list-building, cutting hours of work to minutes. Forrester found 42% of U.S. consumer marketing decision-makers use publisher inclusion lists. Some agencies and media buyers heavily rely on inclusion lists to satisfy client brand-safety concerns while accessing open-web inventory. Advocates argue that technology should assess quality signals as well as safety signals to avoid excluding valuable inventory.

Read at Digiday