The FTC approved Omnicom’s purchase of Interpublic Group this week, after the ad agency giant promised not to interact in any nefarious brand safety activities.
If you’re thinking that I’m exaggerating, the proof is within the consent decree:
Omnicom cannot base its “promoting spend … on the Media Publisher’s political or ideological viewpoints, or the political or ideological viewpoints expressed in content that the Media Publisher sells promoting to run alongside.” It also cannot depend on third-party “exclusion lists” premised on political or ideological views to find out where it’s going to direct promoting.
Isn’t that, partially, how brand safety works?
How we got up to now
If you were wondering, this is happening under the fig leaf of “protecting free speech” to prop up X/Twitter and help that poor waif, Elon Musk. Here’s the way it got here about:
Omnicom — parent company of agencies like BBDO and TBWA — is buying Interpublic Group, which owns McCann Worldgroup, in an all-stock deal that values IPG at about $13 billion. The combination might be the largest ad company on the planet, with around $25 billion in combined net revenue based on 2024 numbers.
The deal was announced in December following President Trump’s election. At the time, executives from each corporations expressed confidence that the brand new “business-friendly” FTC wouldn’t ask any pesky questions on anti-competitiveness would quickly approve the deal. But the parents at Omnicom got caught within the administration’s Woke Ness Monster hunt. Said monster being the explanation for the outbreaks of empathy, tolerance and representative democracy undermining America’s greatness.
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In March, the FTC asked Omnicom and IPG for more information concerning the deal. Under normal circumstances, that’s a typical request. However, the request got here just as the commission began investigating big ad firms and progressive advocacy groups for not promoting on X. Elon Musk’s media platform. (Anyone here remember the first Amendment? It was an awesome one.)
The business genius of Elon Musk
X (née Twitter) was quite popular with the general public and advertisers until shortly after Musk bought it in November 2022. He paid $44 billion — twice Twitter’s market cap — for an organization barely turning a profit. Musk borrowed the cash to purchase Twitter, although he didn’t have to, saddling the corporate with the debt, and why not? He was never going to find a way to earn back what he paid.
He then did all the pieces possible to scare off advertisers. He removed the content moderation team and the trust and safety council, and the location began to be overrun by fake and unverified accounts. In the primary month of Musk’s ownership, a bogus Eli Lilly account said the pharmaceutical company would give customers insulin, causing its stock price to drop 4.37%.
By early 2023, 50 of the location’s top 100 advertisers had stopped promoting or reduced it considerably. Later that yr, amid a big rise in hate speech, Musk posted a tweet endorsing an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. He followed that with a tweet concerning the thoroughly debunked right-wing conspiracy theory “Pizzagate.”
It gets stupider
To be fair, he apologized for the anti-Semitic tweet at a New York Times event. However, he followed that with a profanity-laden rant concerning the corporations that had stopped promoting on X, singling out Disney CEO Robert Iger. Immediately after that, Walmart stopped promoting on the location.
A report released in September found only 4% of marketers believed the platform provided adequate brand safety. Musk then took full responsibility for the fiasco and promised to make changes. HAH! He sued marketers and watchdog organizations like Media Matters for allegedly colluding in an illegal ad boycott.
Dig deeper: Hate speech on social media can significantly damage brands
He also made full use of his bromance with President Trump to strong-arm advertisers, threatening much more brands with lawsuits in the event that they don’t spend more on X. It is unclear if the danger of motion by government agencies was stated or implied. I haven’t seen any latest survey numbers, nevertheless it’s unlikely these actions improved marketers’ opinion of X.
You can’t take politics out of brand safety
When I used to be a newspaper editor, the one rule regarding promoting was that stories about airplane crashes weren’t allowed next to airline ads. That’s the only type of brand safety, and it might also be the one form that doesn’t involve politics.
Left-leaning brands like Ben & Jerry’s aren’t the one ones that don’t want their ads running next to pro-Nazi content. A brand’s value proposition is political. It is a press release of what that brand stands for. Standing for one thing means ruling out other things.
Dove is for ladies and emphasizes body positivity and the concept beauty isn’t restricted to fashion models. These are all political positions. Until about nine years ago, they were the sort of saccharine, vaguely empowering political positions that few people would hassle objecting to. Because of its brand values, Dove didn’t run ads in lad’s mags like Maxim or FHM, that are the antithesis of those values.
Under the FTC’s consent decree with Omnicom, the ad agency can be vulnerable to legal penalties if it couldn’t show the choice was made for non-ideological reasons. In this case, readership demographics appear to be a surefire defense, but with the present trend of precedent-free legal decisions, who the [expletive deleted] knows? And, if the federal government is willing to go after a mega-company like Omnicom, it’s willing to go after anybody.
Once upon a time, corporations could spend their promoting dollars wherever they wanted. The only check on it was the consumers’ opinion. That is how free markets are purported to work. Once upon a time, Republicans were in favor of that.
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