The closure of GARM (the Global Alliance for Responsible Media) back in August left a hole in the media landscape, after a lawsuit by Elon Musk’s X caused the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) to shutter its brand safety initiative. Four months on from the closure, questions remain over the implications for brand safety standards that were established under GARM’s principles.
Days after the announcement, a WARC survey found that brand safety remains the biggest concern for advertisers and agencies in planning their programmatic strategies; 60 percent of respondents cited brand safety and suitability as a major cause for concern. The absence of GARM’s standards, most notably the Brand Safety Floor and Brand Suitability Framework, would presumably exacerbate those concerns.
Reinforced floors
The good news for advertisers is that the framework has not been dismantled, and the brand safety policies built by publishers and platforms, using GARM’s taxonomy, appear to remain in place.
“It’s not like there are a bunch of competing taxonomies,” comments Vanessa Otero, Founder and CEO at Ad Fontes Media, a US media watchdog. “Companies still employ their methodologies as they did before. The GARM taxonomy was and is a helpful set of categories and definitions, so it continues to be used even if it’s not touted by companies as a thing they are aiming to align with.”
Otero notes that dictating brand safety policies “was never in GARM’s purview.” Instead the initiative provided a system for companies to categorise their content into different levels of brand suitability.
An anonymous source in the brand safety space concurs that these frameworks are still standing, and third-party tools that employ GARM’s taxonomy for verification and measurement are still in use across the industry.
“The GARM Standards still exist both as standalone guidelines that anyone can use, as well as in the form of functionality that has been built into tools by platforms, publishers, intermediaries, and verification vendors,” according to the source. “There isn’t a need for a ‘new’ industry standard as the existing one is still being used.”
And several companies have restated their commitment to GARM’s standards in recent weeks. In October, YouTube’s Head of Sales UK&I, Erica Probst, told VideoWeek: “We haven’t changed any of our policies” since the closure. And Pinterest responded that GARM’s Brand Safety Floor and Suitability Framework “remain in place” at the social sharing site. “GARM’s discontinuation of its activities will not have any impact on any brand safety initiatives at Pinterest,” said a spokesperson.
X also stated its commitment to brand safety, but unsurprisingly made no mention of GARM, having essentially sued the initiative out of existence. “X is proud to be a platform advertisers can trust to safely market to consumers,” said a company spokesman. “X is 99 percent brand safe backed by both third-party verification partners, DoubleVerify and Integral Ads Science.”
A chilling effect
However, brand safety could be at risk if advertisers fear legal action for using tools designed to ensure responsible ad investments. The X lawsuit named several GARM members as defendants, including Mars and Unilever, accusing the group of “collectively withholding billions of dollars in advertising revenue” from the Elon Musk-owned company.
GARM members were also questioned by the House Judiciary Committee in July. The Committee published a report accusing GARM of “boycotts and other coordinated action to demonetise platforms” and “silence conservative views”. The findings became the basis of X’s legal case against the group.
So while media quality itself looks unlikely to change without GARM, legal and political pressure could affect buyer behaviour. Since the US election a number of major brands, including Comcast, Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, IBM and Lionsgate, have reportedly returned to X after pausing their spend over brand safety concerns on the social media platform.
“The question is whether buyers behave differently in using the available tools as a result of the X lawsuit,” comments the anonymous brand safety source. “I don’t suspect they will but that seems like the bigger proximate concern.”
Vanessa Otero also warns of a “chilling effect” for new initiatives in the brand safety space, with the fallout disinsentivising industry bodies from working towards new standards. “The suing and dissolution of GARM has had a chilling effect on new industry initiatives around all of responsible media,” she says.
On the plus side, brand safety continues to be a priority for marketers, as evidenced by the WARC survey, meaning it remains in the interests of publishers, platforms and advertisers to invest in brand safety tools as the media landscape grows in complexity.
“If the last six or seven years of brand safety-related issues has taught us anything, it is that new issues will arise and there will be a need to modify these tools,” notes the anonymous source.
Otero agrees that these tools will continue to adapt to the needs of responsible marketers. “Even prior to GARM’s dissolution there has been increased market demand for brand safety tools to evolve and be more precise, especially around categories like news where current approaches are overbroad,” she says. “Brand safety will get better.”
