A conservative crackdown on advertisers has forced a 'brand safety' reset

Business Insider

6 days ago

Conservative media company The Daily Wire is celebrating the downfall of " brand safety," and benefiting from the new state of play in the ad business during the second Trump era.
Last week, The Daily Wire's commercial team received a request for proposal, or RFP, from Omnicom, one of the world's biggest ad agency groups. An RFP typically indicates an agency or advertiser's interest in buying ad space.
The RFP was a huge win for The Daily Wire. It was only the second time it had received an inbound ad request from Omnicom. The first was in May, but the latest was a much bigger buy.
Last year, The Daily Wire's famous cofounder and podcaster, Ben Shapiro, testified that the site had been unfairly shunned by major advertisers and ad agencies who, he said, had deemed its content unsafe for their brands.
"Brand safety was being defined by people with a severe bias against a certain point of view," The Daily Wire's editor in chief, Brent Scher, told Business Insider in an interview.
But since President Donald Trump's return to the White House, the power dynamics around "brand safety" — the practice of brands seeking to avoid their ads appearing next to, or otherwise supporting, "unsafe" content — have shifted, with some advertisers scrambling to avoid any whiff of anti-conservative bias. The situation is particularly acute for Omnicom, making its outreach to The Daily Wire both unprecedented and unsurprising.
Last month, Andrew Ferguson, chairman of the Republican-led Federal Trade Commission, gave conditional approval to a proposed $13.5 billion merger of Omnicom and fellow ad company IPG, which would create the world's largest ad agency. It had an unusual caveat: Omnicom agreed to a consent order that would prevent it from colluding with other companies to encourage its advertiser clients to boycott media based on publishers' "political or ideological viewpoints."
'Brand suitability' versus 'brand safety'
The FTC's move is the latest victory in the battle against brand safety waged by US conservatives. Brand safety in 2025 has become such a political flash point that some ad execs are changing the way they talk about the topic.
"I hear the phrase 'brand suitability' far more than 'brand safety' now," said Liam Brennan, a marketing consultant and former ad agency director. "It makes it sound like a cop out, but it's a shift in the approach brands are taking. Before it was 'block, block, block,' now it's more about where my brand should be appearing. It's a more positive approach."
While the Trump administration's actions have turned up the heat on brand safety practices, a broader backlash has been building for some time. Brand safety began as a seemingly innocuous practice of preventing brands from appearing next to the worst of the internet, such as violence, pornography, and illegal content. But it gradually expanded, with brands seeking to avoid a wide variety of political issues, or platforms that supported them.
In investigations and lawsuits, lawmakers and other high-profile conservatives have argued that ad practitioners, brand safety tech vendors, and industry groups forced the brand safety pendulum to swing too far into partisan areas, unfairly depriving right-leaning outlets of ad dollars. Media companies on the left have said they, too, have been harmed by advertisers who deemed news sites as unsafe for brands.
"What may have started as a good idea expanded, and then became too broad," said Mark Penn, CEO of the advertising holding company Stagwell. "Consequentially, it wasn't really about brand safety — it became almost brand censorship."
The emergence of brand safety
The practice of brand safety arose as advertisers shifted from analog media buying — placing deals directly with the TV stations, billboard owners, or newspaper proprietors they wished to buy space with — toward digital.
Using technology, advertisers could target their audiences across swaths of websites, social platforms, and apps with just a few clicks. However, this meant they had less visibility about the content their ads were likely to appear next to. Brand safety technology was created to give advertisers more control over the types of content they wanted to fund or avoid.
Keyword block lists were an early but somewhat blunt tool, helping advertisers avoid appearing in articles about grisly news topics like murders or natural disasters. However, marketers often didn't maintain good block list hygiene.
Mike Zaneis, CEO of ad industry accreditation organization the Trustworthy Accountability Group, said he was recently reviewing brand block lists that still had the term "Ariana Grande" on them, years after the deadly terrorist attack that took place at the pop star's Manchester Arena, UK, concert in 2017.
"Never mind that she's won two Grammys since then," Zaneis said.
Enter: The conservative backlash
The scrutiny on brand safety notably dialed up in 2024 and took on a partisan tone.
Jim Jordan, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, released an investigation that accused advertisers of illegally colluding to withhold ad dollars from conservative-leaning media like The Daily Wire, X (after Elon Musk's takeover of the company), and "The Joe Rogan Experience." The report took aim at an initiative called the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, which developed brand safety frameworks and common definitions that advertisers and Big Tech platforms like Meta and YouTube could universally adopt.
Elon Musk's X then sued several major brands, including Mars and CVS Health, alleging their participation in GARM involved a conspiracy to withhold ad dollars from the platform formerly known as Twitter. The conservative video platform Rumble also sued GARM and some of its members, making similar claims in its suit.
GARM shut down shortly after X's suit was filed. Its parent organization, the World Federation of Advertisers, denied wrongdoing but said GARM didn't have the resources to fight the legal action. In a May legal filing seeking to dismiss the X case, the defendants said the lawsuit was an attempt to use the courts win back business X had "lost in the free market when it disrupted its own business and alienated many of its customers."
In a statement, the WFA said GARM provided tools to help advertisers better exercise their freedom to choose where to place their ads in the best interests of their brands, and that it was always voluntary and pro-competitive.
"WFA will continue to fight these allegations, and we are confident that the US judicial system will find in our favor," the statement said.
While GARM is no more, the lawsuits and the Judiciary Committee's investigation continue, and the FTC has joined the brand safety battle under the Trump administration.
Ferguson, the FTC chair, has said that maintaining a free ad market and free speech is a top priority and that he hopes other ad companies will adopt policies similar to those in the Omnicom-IPG consent decree.
That notice extends to other advertising vendors in the brand safety sphere.
In May, the FTC sent sweeping civil investigative demands to media watchdogs and rating firms, including Media Matters and Ad Fontes Media, seeking information about their brand safety practices. In one such letter, viewed by BI, the FTC sought documents related to relationships with GARM, the publicly traded ad verification firms Integral Ad Science and DoubleVerify, and other entities that track and characterize "misinformation," "hate speech," "false" or "deceptive" content, and other similar categories.
While the FTC's actions have made many in the ad industry nervous, some execs consider much of brand safety to be, as Stagwell's Penn puts it, a "fabricated issue." Penn said there were only limited situations in which brands might really be negatively affected by where their ads appeared.
"From the polling I've done, conservatives think that they were being censored and demonetized, and liberals think they were being censored, so nobody was particularly happy about what was going on," Penn said. (Stagwell owns the public opinion and advisory firm The Harris Poll.)
Will the brand safety crackdown benefit news publishers?
Execs at The Daily Wire say the scrutiny on brand safety was warranted and has gotten results.
"My team is inside of the bigger agencies, having discussions, whereas the door was automatically shut 12 to 16 months ago," said The Daily Wire's SVP of ad revenue, Christine Hoffmann. "We're getting business from Fortune 500 companies, like Chevron, like Amazon, like Paramount, and that was business that was nonexistent to us."
Other conservative news outlets, including Fox News and The National Review, have also noticed a bump in advertising interest since Trump took office for the second time. Ad industry insiders previously told BI this reflected advertisers' realization that half of the country voted for Trump, but that it could also be a signal of advertisers hedging against political risk.
The notion that the crackdown on brand safety will provide a long-term bump to news publishers is untested and, for many industry insiders, feels unlikely. An executive from the media buying giant GroupM testified in a House Judiciary Committee hearing last year that just 1.28% of its clients' global ad budgets went toward news outlets. Meanwhile, Alphabet, Meta, and Amazon — with their superior scale and adtech — are set to take in more than half of global ad spending outside China this year, according to the latest forecast from the World Advertising Research Center.
Omnicom has agreed to be audited to demonstrate its compliance with the FTC's proposed consent decree, which also includes an agreement not to create block lists, unless requested to do so by clients. The FTC's provisional agreement says Omnicom-IPG can't collude with other firms to steer client ad spend based on political ideologies, which might cause some advertisers to simply opt to avoid news altogether. As BI previously reported, some ad industry insiders and analysts think the government's crackdown on brand safety is an overreach that will hurt publishers of all kinds while further consolidating power with the tech giants.
New tools could help brands avoid the censorship label, but there's no room for GARM 2.0
Some in the ad industry tell BI they're hopeful that brand safety could enter an apolitical era, powered by tech rather than individual decisions over blunt filters.
"My view is that AI will bring greater nuance to brand safety — making it more effective for buyers and less restrictive for sellers," said David Kohl, cofounder of the performance marketing firm Symitri.
Kohl said startups like Mobian are building models that assess context, user sentiment, and real-time ad performance to identify which media environments deliver and which don't.
Elsewhere, Stagwell is creating what Penn describes as a politically neutral news marketplace, in partnership with the adtech company The Trade Desk, enabling advertisers to buy multiple news sites at once, according to demographics.
While brand safety might become more tech-enabled, it seems unlikely there will be a GARM 2.0 for some time yet.
"It would be far too easy to become a target," said Lisa Macpherson, a former marketing executive who now serves as the policy director of Public Knowledge, a tech policy consumer advocacy group.
Just ask the advertising agency group Dentsu. Late last year, Dentsu quickly exited its involvement with the creation of a new coalition that had intended to encourage ad investments in "credible" news. Days after the press release about the coalition was published, the House Judiciary Committee requested documents from the ad firm, having noticed similarities to GARM. In response, Dentsu said it had decided "not to pursue the initiative" nor "pursue any other effort with similar aims."
Macpherson said advertisers would continue to do what's necessary to protect their investments in their brands. Yet, as the threat of lawsuits and document demands related to GARM rumbles on, people in the ad industry will likely avoid using the phrase "brand safety" in emails or marketing materials.
"They may describe it differently," Macpherson said. "They will be very careful to couch it in language that evokes their constitutional right" to send ad dollars or not spend money on certain media outlets based on the suitability for their individual brands, she added.
Zaneis of TAG said the recent government and legal scrutiny of brand safety practices might have been the jolt the industry needed, forcing marketers to pay closer attention to an issue that had gotten out of hand.
"We may not like how we got here as an industry, but it's where we should have been all along," Zaneis said.