The decision by WFA leadership to succumb to Elon Musk’s pressure and suspend the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) when advertisers needed it most is disappointing and dangerous.
But it presents an opportunity to rethink our industry’s broken approach to brand safety.
Musk’s decision to sue the WFA and advertisers is grounded in hypocrisy and entitlement, not freedom of speech. The X advertising boycott wasn’t a conspiracy. Advertisers exercised common sense as they made their individual decisions to stop spending on X.
However, in suing the WFA, X weaponized a pervasive vulnerability in advertising’s brand standards. With narrow definitions and lackluster enforcement, X can claim that the platform “met or exceeded” industry standards for trust and safety and was boycotted anyway, to support its claims of collusion. But did these standards ever really reflect brands’ expectations?
Brand safety has been diluted and distorted, and it is now viewed as synonymous with content adjacency. This was a costly error. It has allowed for fear-mongering to the detriment of brands and publishers. It created false friction between brand safety and freedom of speech. As a result, brand safety has become polarized, politicized and weaponized.
We have now seen why lax standards and loose enforcement can go horribly wrong for advertisers. But advertisers have the opportunity to reclaim control and redefine “brand safety” to better reflect their own expectations.
Who is safe when the fox is in the henhouse?
The reality is GARM stopped being a coalition of marketers, for marketers. And it’s not alone in abdicating its responsibility to protect brands.
For example, X’s brand safety controls don’t extend to replies. Apparently, according to the Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG), another of the industry’s supposed watchdogs, that’s just fine!
After TAG reissued its brand safety certification of X in June, CEO Mike Zaneis cited GARM’s standards as justification. “Marketers set a very specific standard on brand safety adjacencies for social platforms,” he wrote on LinkedIn. In this case, that meant ads should be “one unit away” from potentially objectionable content. Zaneis added that it’s up to marketers to determine whether this is the “correct standard.”
No marketer would say they’re fine being two units away from hate speech. But a ton of ad tech companies stand to commercially benefit from such placements.
Meanwhile, marketers know that keeping their brand safe means far more than avoiding proximity to “potentially objectionable content.” It is fundamentally about protecting their investment in their brand as their most important asset. It extends to mitigating legal, reputational and commercial risk, and safeguarding the trust of their customers. It involves considering not just where their ads appear, but what their budgets fund and what partners they choose to work with.
The narrowing of the industry’s definition of brand safety is no accident. These standards were established subject to the heavy influence of the very platforms and ad tech companies they purport to govern, with limited enforcement or accountability.
And in the wake of the Supreme Court’s reversal of the Chevron doctrine, which weakens the authority of federal agencies like the FTC to establish rules and enforce standards, the IAB is popping champagne, while the WFA folds under pressure.
These are the industry groups protecting brands? Something has to change.
Putting the brand back in brand safety
To be clear, it is a perfectly reasonable business decision for advertisers to choose not to advertise on a platform with a child sexual abuse material problem, a bot problem, and that has drawn the ire of regulators domestically and abroad.
In the wake of Musk’s takeover of Twitter, there was complete chaos and destabilization. Had a question for your sales reps? The reps are all gone! Will Musk stay in command? Check the results of his Twitter poll!
And let’s not forget blue-check-gate enabling brandjacking by random users. Amid middle-finger Mario and Eli Lilly’s stock tumbling, why would a brand feel inspired to spend their money on the platform?
Simply put, content adjacency was only one of the failures that rattled advertiser confidence in X.
It is equally reasonable that many advertisers have not returned to X. The risks are too great, and the benefits too few. We can call it brand safety, responsible investment or just plain business sense. Not to mention Musk may want to consider if telling advertisers to go F themselves might’ve been a two-way street.
The WFA’s decision to shutter GARM sets a dangerous precedent for succumbing to bullies. But advertisers won’t let Musk’s bullying shake them. They will quietly stand firm in their right to adopt standards that meet their own needs and to decide what’s best for their brands and their businesses, now more than ever.
Out of GARM’s ashes emerges a new beginning, one where transparency and accountability can serve as the foundation for responsible investment and where standards reflect the true expectations of advertisers. We have the opportunity now to get this right. We can’t let this void be filled by opportunists with ulterior motives and conflicting commercial interests.
We must reframe and rebuild the concept of brand safety and return these decisions to where they rightfully belong: in the hands of advertisers, with their customers at the heart and their business at the core.
“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.
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