GARM’s discontinuation ‘sad day for industry,’ brand safety experts say | CampaignLive August 2024

The Global Alliance for Responsible Media dissolved in the face of a federal antitrust lawsuit from X.

The World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) on Thursday dissolved the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), a cross-industry initiative to help companies navigate misinformation and harmful content online, Business Insider first reported.

The organization is shutting down days after X filed an antitrust lawsuit against it, alleging the WFA, GARM and members CVS Health, Mars, Orsted and Unilever colluded to suppress conservative voices and cut off ad revenue from the platform.

In an open letter to advertisers, X CEO Linda Yaccarino explained that X pursued litigation after seeing a House Judiciary Committee report accusing GARM of using its ​“tremendous market power” to treat X unfairly.

Stephan Loerke, CEO of the WFA, told members that the nonprofit intended to fight the case in court and expressed confidence it would ​“demonstrate our full adherence to competition rules in all our activities.”

However, GARM will not be involved in that fight and has ceased operations due to its limited resources to combat X in court. The WFA will continue to operate.

The World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) on Thursday dissolved the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), a cross-industry initiative to help companies navigate misinformation and harmful content online, Business Insider first reported.

The organization is shutting down days after X filed an antitrust lawsuit against it, alleging the WFA, GARM and members CVS Health, Mars, Orsted and Unilever colluded to suppress conservative voices and cut off ad revenue from the platform.

In an open letter to advertisers, X CEO Linda Yaccarino explained that X pursued litigation after seeing a House Judiciary Committee report accusing GARM of using its ​“tremendous market power” to treat X unfairly.

Stephan Loerke, CEO of the WFA, told members that the nonprofit intended to fight the case in court and expressed confidence it would ​“demonstrate our full adherence to competition rules in all our activities.”

However, GARM will not be involved in that fight and has ceased operations due to its limited resources to combat X in court. The WFA will continue to operate.

GARM declined to comment and referred to an incoming statement on the WFA’s website.

In response to a House Judiciary Committee post calling GARM’s discontinuation a ​“Big win for the First Amendment,” Yaccarino stated, ​“No small group should be able to monopolize what gets monetized. This is an important acknowledgment and a necessary step in the right direction. I am hopeful that it means ecosystem-wide reform is coming.”

Consultants told Campaign US the lawsuit was frivolous and disastrous for X, as brands are free to not advertise where they wish.

Ruben Schreurs, chief strategy officer at Ebiquity, said that GARM’s erasure sets a ​“dangerous precedent in general, but now specifically in the advertising industry.”

“Litigation should not be allowed to be weaponized in a way where organizations can be hamstrung by overwhelming and unwarranted legal pressures from better-funded plaintiffs,” he said.

Noah Mallin, former head of IMGN Brand Studio at Warner Music Group and current social media consultant, suggested X could use GARM’s dissolution to flex its strength against other advertisers.

“GARM was the weakest part of the announced parties to the lawsuit in terms of ability to fight with legal firepower,” he said. ​“In that sense, they are meant to be a head on the pike to make it seem dangerous to criticize X as a platform.”

Brand safety in flux

GARM’s dissolution comes as the industry loses confidence in the brand safety tools at its disposal. 

On Wednesday, Adalytics reported to have found hundreds of ads next to explicitly racist and sexual content, despite those ads being served using brand safety controls from Integral Ad Science and DoubleVerify.

Arielle Garcia, director of intelligence at Check My Ads, said the WFA’s decision to shut down GARM and ​“succumb to Elon’s pressure at a time when advertisers needed them most is disappointing and dangerous.”

“I’m certain we’ll see other trade bodies with their own interests opportunistically positioning themselves to fill the void. Advertisers must not fall for it,” she added.

Rich Raddon, Zefr cofounder and co-CEO, said that GARM’s work establishing common frameworks for brand safety contributed to more accurate and transparent brand safety reporting. 

“Let’s hope the industry doesn’t retreat back into the dark ages where every placement, no matter the risky content adjacency, is considered 99.9% brand safe,” he said.

But GARM’s disbanding could provide an opportunity for the industry to revisit and redefine its approach to brand safety, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, Garcia added. 

For years, publishers have struggled to secure ad revenue due to brand sensitivities surrounding news and politics — with GARM itself designating political news as medium to high risk. Publishers are often blacklisted by automatic brand safety controls filled with outdated keyword block lists.

However, many of the political concerns laid out in GARM’s framework have little supporting evidence. In May, Stagwell released a report finding that adjacency to politics has little effect on an ad’s effectiveness, despite many brands restricting publishers’ ad revenue.

“Out of GARM’s ashes, there is opportunity to unwind the distortion of ​‘brand safety’ that allowed it to be weaponized to the detriment of brands and publishers in the first place,” Garcia said. 

“Advertisers know that protecting their brand is not only about where their ads appear, but what they fund, and the practices of the partners they choose to work with,” she continued ​“They have the opportunity now to take back control and define standards that suit their needs and expectations.”