Three of the world’s biggest advertising conglomerates have agreed to stop colluding to defund media outlets whose politics they didn’t like.
The Federal Trade Commission and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, joined by seven other states, filed a complaint and simultaneous settlement against Dentsu US, GroupM Worldwide (WPP’s media-buying arm), and Publicis on April 15, accusing them of running what amounts to a coordinated censorship operation through the advertising supply chain.
Starting in 2018, these agencies, which collectively control over $81 billion in ad-buying power, agreed to adopt identical “brand safety” standards that treated so-called “misinformation” as a category of content too dangerous for any advertiser to touch.
They did this through two industry groups: the American Association of Advertising Agencies’ Advertiser Protection Bureau, and the World Federation of Advertisers’ Global Alliance for Responsible Media, better known as GARM. The result was a shared “Brand Safety Floor” that could starve publishers of revenue without any single company having to take public responsibility for the decision.
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One ad agency executive described the arrangement’s origins by saying, “the major holding companies came together under the 4As and agreed that brand safety is so important, that we must combine efforts, become one voice, and stop sending potential mixed signals.” The 4As vice president put it even more bluntly: “When it comes to brand and consumer safety, media agencies have to put competition aside.”
Put competition aside. That looks like an antitrust violation described as a virtue.
GARM operated under explicit secrecy. According to the complaint, GARM told the six largest global advertising holding companies that discussions about brand safety were governed by a principle: “The first rule of Fight Club is: You do not talk about Fight Club. The second rule of Fight Club is: You do not talk about Fight Club.”
GARM leadership wanted “the agencies [to] speak as a single entity to describe how they’re tailoring plans and buys.” At a retrospective on GARM’s third anniversary, participants celebrated what they called “uncommon collaboration,” praising how the agencies came together to “collaborate not compete on safety.”
The word “safety” is a misnomer. What they were actually collaborating on was a system to cut off ad revenue from publishers whose content fell below their agreed-upon standard for acceptable speech. And who got to define what was acceptable? Organizations like NewsGuard, the Global Disinformation Index, Check My Ads, and Media Matters for America. The complaint describes these groups as having “sought to elevate concerns within the digital advertising industry about what they viewed as ‘misinformation,’ in order to deprive certain sites of the digital ad revenue they needed to survive.”
The Global Disinformation Index was founded because its creators believed the 2016 US presidential election and the Brexit referendum were caused by media disinformation, a problem they decided could be solved by going after those media companies’ advertisers.
Check My Ads announced in 2022 that it was “launching the first effort to permanently block” conservative media figures like Charlie Kirk, Glenn Beck, and Steve Bannon “from the ad industry,” in an article titled “Here’s our plan to defund the insurrectionists.” Media Matters ran campaigns pressuring advertisers to pull spending from Fox News and later from Elon Musk’s X.
The chilling effect of this arrangement went well beyond the individual publishers who lost revenue. When the three largest ad-buying agencies in the country all agree to use the same criteria for excluding websites, the definition of “brand safe” becomes industry-wide orthodoxy. Publishers who might have survived one agency’s disapproval couldn’t survive all of them acting in concert. News outlets, commentators, and social media platforms were the primary targets.
A House Judiciary Committee report found that GARM discussed putting center-right outlets, including Breitbart News, Daily Wire, and Fox News on advertising exclusion lists. An internal GARM communication, quoted in earlier FTC proceedings, captured the thinking.
John Montgomery, then-executive vice president of Global Brand Safety, wrote to GARM leader Rob Rakowitz: “There is an interesting parallel here with Breitbart. Before Breitbart crossed the line and started spouting blatant misinformation, we had long discussions about whether we should include them on our exclusion lists. As much as we hated their ideology and bullshit, we couldn’t really justify blocking them for misguided opinion. We watched them very carefully and it didn’t take long for them to cross the line.”
FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson framed the case in both antitrust and speech terms. “The ad agencies’ brand-safety conspiracy turned competition in the market for ad-buying services on its head,” he said. “The antitrust laws guarantee participation in a market free from conduct, such as economic boycotts, that distort the fundamental competitive pressures that promote lower prices, higher-quality products, and increased innovation.”
Ferguson added that the collusion “deprived advertisers of the benefits of differentiated brand-safety standards that could be tailored to their unique advertising inventory.”
He went further: “This unlawful collusion not only damaged our marketplace, but also distorted the marketplace of ideas by discriminating against speech and ideas that fell below the unlawfully agreed-upon floor.”
Paxton called the scheme “an egregious attempt to control public opinion and silence those who speak out against the liberal elites and powerful corporations.” He added: “I will continue to lead the fight against viewpoint suppression and protect the speech of Americans from corrupt manipulation.”
Under the proposed settlement, filed in US District Court for the Northern District of Texas, all three agencies must stop using exclusion lists and coordinated agreements to restrict ad spending based on political viewpoints or social commentary.
They cannot enter into or enforce agreements that restrict business with media publishers based on political or social commentary content, and they cannot direct or limit ad spending based on political viewpoints, ideological viewpoints, or DEI commitments. A court-appointed monitor will oversee compliance. The settlements require court approval to take effect.
