The dust is settling on the World Federation of Advertising’s decision to shut down the the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) following growing attacks on the ad-buying standards from conservative media outlets and lawmakers. And in the podcast industry, there is even some optimism that the move could mean that some content that has had difficulties monetizing will see more advertiser support.
Barometer CEO Tamara Zubatiy has spoken with several of the big advertising agencies actively running campaigns that are either targeted or monitored by her company. She says there have been no changes to how they are spending with podcasts. “Everything is all systems go,” Zubatiy says. In many respects, Zubatiy says nothing will really change for podcasters since there never was an actual set of GARM guidelines for the medium. Instead, podcasters and advertisers developed standards that used the general framework and applied them to audio.
“GARM has always just been kind of a guide,” Zubatiy says. She says Barometer opted to a GARM member under the belief that it is easier to change things from the inside. But WFA kept the focus on social networks, never expanding its guidelines to other media. Zubatiy thinks that was a lost opportunity because it never made a distinction between user-generated content and that produced by premium publishers like iHeartPodcasts, SiriusXM or Acast.
“At the end of the day, nothing is going to change in terms of brands wanting to and needing to enforce their standards,” Zubatiy says. “This is just us entering a new era of allowing those standards to be much more fine-grained and nuanced, instead of kind of the way that they're currently being enforced in a rather haphazard way.”
Triton Digital’s Sounder provides third-party verification across top podcasts helping brands avoid unsafe and questionable content to prevent negative brand associations. Triton CEO John Rosso says as advertisers consider GARM alternatives, Sounder’s focus will be on embracing whatever standards the ad community embraces.
“Triton Digital supports industry standards, and our Sounder product has all the tools in place to support advertisers’ evolving needs around brand safety,” Rosso says. “Sounder has supported IAB and GARM taxonomies for brand-directed contextual targeting and will continue to support the taxonomies that our customers use while also looking to support relevant industry standards in the future.”
Simplifying Safety Standards
Dan Granger, the founder of the audio ad agency Oxford Road, has seen the GARM standards as a framework that was doing more harm than good, and he is happy to see it go.
“I see this as a positive step,” Granger writes in a LinkedIn post. He says the problem was GARM was its “unwieldy complexity” that asked too many “wrong questions” that burdened marketers with arbitrary metrics.
“The problem with GARM wasn’t an inherent anti-conservative bias but its unwieldy complexity, which penalized any program fully implementing it,” Granger says. He says that the current technology used by ad buyers were unable to fairly apply GARM’s complex definition. “This led to 66% of top podcasts being flagged under GARM, based on today's best technology,” Granger says. He has pushed instead for what he bills as “media nutrition labels” that are more straightforward and logical.
Oxford Road partnered with Seekr Technologies in January to introduce a civility score that gives marketers a number on a 0 to 100 scale with a clear specific explanation of why a show or individual episodes achieved that score. They say it will allow brands to take advantage of the so-called longtail of podcasts, rather than focus on just the top shows.
Conservative media outlets have been the most outspoken critics of GARM, and while Zubatiy doesn’t dismiss their allegations of bias against their podcasts and other content, she says it is a much bigger problem.
“This is felt by all of news,” she says. “And the culprit, to be clear, is not GARM. It's vendors that misinterpret the GARM definitions that are quite good – and then effectively impact the content monetization.” Zubatiy says it is probably an outgrowth a decision made not to expand the definitions to fit media other than social networks, and it snowballed into many different definitions as publishers were never included in the conversation.
“Advertisers are realizing that these vendors have failed them, and that not only are they advertising on places where they shouldn't be, but that they are missing inventory that they should be getting,” Zubatiy says.
In a white paper released earlier this year, Barometer said based on data collected from more than 25,000 podcasts and analyzed by Barometer, none of the podcast genres in 2023 had what it considers a high risk median brand suitability score.
Legal Cases Continue
Even as GARM has been disbanded, more legal action could be brewing. X owner Elon Musk filed a lawsuit against WFA earlier this month alleging GARM “conspired” with leading brands to withhold “billions” of ad dollars. Fox News parent News Corp. may follow Musk’s lead.
“We are also considering our legal options in confronting the blatant political bias of advertising industry bodies who have done serious damage and denied many advertisers access to a significant audience,” CEO Robert Thomson said during a conference this month.
What’s Next?
Going forward, Zubatiy expects a coalition of premium publishers will come together during the next few months to help fill some of the gaps that GARM will leave. But instead of focusing on the advertisers, she thinks it will approach the issue from the publisher’s vantagepoint.
“It has to be more capitalistically driven,” she says. “So we're talking with some large platforms that are more focused on the open internet to see if they might be excited about facilitating something like this for their customers. I think it would be a really exciting win.”
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