Yesterday's much-hyped trade deal between the US and UK was all about
cars and beef, with no sign of a rumored reduction in the British Digital Services Tax, which bills the biggest tech companies based on their revenue. US negotiators haven't given up on it though. 'That's a very big deal to President Trump,' said White House trade adviser Peter Navarro, who doesn't sound like a fan either:
'Digital taxes has spread like a bad virus around the world, but it started in Europe, and it basically targets American companies, I can say it in no other way.'
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Associated Press
32 minutes ago
- Associated Press
Israeli airstrikes kill 33 Palestinians in Gaza
DEIR al-BALAH, Gaza Strip (AP) — Israeli airstrikes killed at least 33 Palestinians in Gaza, hospital officials said on Sunday, as Israel's military said it has struck over 100 targets in the embattled enclave in the past day. The fighting came as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was preparing to fly to Washington for talks at the White House aimed at pushing forward ceasefire efforts. President Donald Trump has floated a plan for an initial 60-day ceasefire that would include a partial release of hostages held by Hamas in exchange for an increase in humanitarian supplies allowed into Gaza. The proposed truce calls for talks on ending the 21-month war altogether. Israel strikes dozens of targets Twenty people were killed and 25 wounded after Israeli strikes hit two houses in Gaza City, according to Mohammed Abu Selmia, the director of Shifa Hospital that services the area. In southern Gaza, 13 Palestinians were killed by strikes in Muwasi, an area on Gaza's Mediterranean where many displaced people live in tents, officials at Nasser Hospital in neaby Khan Younis told The Associated Press. Five of the dead belonged to the same family according to the hospital. The Israeli military had no immediate comment on the individual strikes, but said it struck 130 targets across the Gaza Strip in the last 24 hours. It said the strikes targeted Hamas command and control structures, storage facilities, weapons and launchers, and that they killed a number of militants in northern Gaza. The war began when Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing some 1,200 people and taking 251 others hostage. Israel responded with an offensive that has killed over 57,000 Palestinians, more than half of them women and children, according to Gaza's Health Ministry. The ministry, which is under Gaza's Hamas government, does not differentiate between civilians and combatants. The U.N. and other international organizations see its figures as the most reliable statistics on war casualties. Ceasefire deal being discussed The strikes occur as efforts to reach a ceasefire deal appeared to gain momentum. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu 's office said his government will send a negotiating team to talks in Qatar on Sunday to conduct indirect talks, adding that Hamas was seeking 'unacceptable' changes to the proposal. The planned talks in Qatar comes ahead of Netanyahu's planned visit on Monday to Washington to meet U.S. President Donald Trump to discuss the deal. It is unclear if a deal will be reached ahead of Netanyahu's White House meeting. Hamas has sought guarantees that the initial truce would lead to a total end to the war and withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza. Previous negotiations have stalled over Hamas demands of guarantees that further negotiations would lead to the war's end, while Netanyahu has insisted Israel would resume fighting to ensure the militant group's destruction. ___ Chehayeb reported from Beirut.
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Asda employs ‘art of war' against Heinz and Nestle
Asda is pressuring suppliers including Heinz, Nestle and General Mills to lower prices as it battles to win back customers. The struggling supermarket is locked in talks with some of its biggest partners as they resist pressure for aggressive cuts. Asda is calling on suppliers to 'share the load' in its price war, which is aimed at reviving its flagging sales. Meetings are set to be held in the coming weeks in an effort to broker agreements with holds-outs, which grocery sources said includes some of the biggest names in the food industry. Asda has re-hired retail veteran Darren Blackhurst as its chief commercial officer to spearhead the negotiations. Mr Blackhurst, who spent four years in the same role between 2006 and 2010, has been tasked with rallying suppliers that have so far refused to concede. His approach to suppliers has been described by former colleagues as 'the art of war'. An Asda source said: 'A lot of suppliers have been supportive. Others are more reluctant. It is about sharing the load. Some just haven't broken out of the four-week [temporary discount] promotion cycle.' By increasing pressure on suppliers, the supermarket hopes to strengthen its price war against the likes of Tesco and Sainsbury's. Allan Leighton, Asda's chairman, wants his supermarket to be at least 10pc cheaper than rivals under its 'rollback' price-cutting plan. However, some of the UK's biggest food producers have so far been reluctant to support the retailer as its sales continue to decline. Despite Mr Leighton's ambitious price-cutting efforts since taking over in November, Asda's market share has fallen from 12.5pc to 11.9pc, according to Kantar. Sales volumes have also been shrinking. Figures from NIQ seen by The Telegraph show that spending on groceries was down 4.6pc in the four weeks to May 17, compared to a 4pc decline over the year as a whole. An industry source said: 'The idea behind 'rollback' is that you get the volume moving first, and then you get suppliers to invest further. 'But what's happened is that Asda has invested in rollback, and the volumes haven't come through. The suppliers are holding back investment because they aren't getting the guaranteed volumes they will need. 'There has to be something in it for them. If they are putting their money into Tesco and Sainsbury's, then they are getting a return. If they are putting their money into Asda, then there is no guaranteed return. It is high risk.' The supermarket has argued that sales have turned a corner in recent weeks and bosses are hopeful that Mr Blackhurst can accelerate growth by getting more suppliers to lower prices. 'For creating chaos, he's great,' said a former colleague. 'We all know what Darren's box of tricks is, and that's bringing out the art of war.' His impending arrival this month has already sparked concerns among some brands. The boss of one Asda supplier said: 'What we have spotted is that the buyers are not talking to anyone unless it is about money. 'We are just keeping our heads down because we fear that when the phone rings, that is what it's going to be about. The general background feeling is that it's desperate times, desperate measures, because they're a business in trouble.' Asda has also been dramatically reducing its range in recent months in an effort to drive higher sales volumes for items that remain. Mr Leighton said in March: 'It's pretty basic stuff, but it's there to grow the business, so what I'm saying is it's good for suppliers because they will get more volume.' The fight to win over suppliers is crucial if Asda is to have any hope of restoring market share, which has been in freefall ever since the business was bought by TDR Capital and the Issa brothers for £6.8bn in 2021. Mr Leighton said recent price cuts had helped Asda open up a price gap with its competitors, which helped the business record its strongest sales performance in a year. 'What we're looking at here is the business turning,' he said in May. An Asda spokesman said: 'The material investment we are making this year to lower prices has already made a difference by opening up a 3pc-6pc price gap over other traditional full-service supermarkets.' Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Business Insider
an hour ago
- Business Insider
A conservative crackdown on advertisers has forced a 'brand safety' reset
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.
