I spent about a quarter of my career at Twitter - a little under 5 years all told. Over that time I got to experience the highs (IPO), lows (immediate post-IPO crash), and the hard work that goes in between the two (the years in the post-IPO era where the company was pulled up from single-digit stock price and double-digit attrition). Throughout this chaotic period of transformation, no matter how hard the valuation got punished for not being Facebook, we knew we couldn’t be Facebook. Twitter had to define value that was all it’s own - certainly part of that value was its dominance over “live” conversation, but insiders might tell you that most of the financial success during this time was derived from what both drew me to work at the platform and kept me there for five tumultuous years (an eon in technology): The desire to work with our advertising customers with the gritty humility of an underdog. In short, I believed that there was value, maybe even virtue, in being the good guy.
One might then suspect I’ve viewed the new direction the platform has taken the last few years, epitomized by legal action culminating in the collapse of one of the guardrails in the advertising industry enforcing good behavior (The Global Alliance for Responsible Media, or GARM), as a bit jarring (or at the very least, a few steps away from being a good guy). Personal judgements and feelings aside, while the transformation of the platform formerly known as Twitter to what it is today has certainly been jarring, it is not necessarily surprising. From the vantage of the new owner of this platform, someone who can be described in a range from “outsider to the peculiarities of the ad industry” to someone with “outright disdain for the ad industry,” there is nothing but mixed signals to be seen. While industry veterans might have suggested reconstituting previously shuttered teams such as Trust and Safety as a way to recoup advertising revenue, the presiding example the industry has set for an outsider looking in is that these things might not matter all that much.
GARM was an initiative set by the World Federation of Advertisers, an organization that exists in the same relative space as other ad industry groups such as the Interactive Advertising Bureau or Association for National Advertisers - membership-based associations that support and facilitate cooperation among their paying members. Despite what frivolous lawsuits and performative politics would have you believe, it’s a stretch to think that any of them are cartel-esque Kingpins capable of strong-arming billion dollar businesses into collective action. These associations lack punitive measures with any real teeth to coerce action - it’s not even quite right to calm them referees within the ads industry when they act more like mediators attempting to get multiple parties with conflicting interests to agree towards a common cause. My stance is not that these associations are without value - quite the opposite. The digital media landscape would be a discoordinated mess of questionable ads showing up in any number of shapes and sizes across an even larger array of questionable content platforms without them. My point is that it is more accurate to say that the members largely inflict their will upon these associations rather than the opposite being true, particularly among platforms and members with a disproportionately influential position within the industry.
“Brand safety” was the focus of GARM - a semi-amorphous concept related to concerns that an advertiser's valuable brand might suffer reputational damage if their ads are around objectionable content. I deliberately note that brand safety is “semi-amorphous” as while it is conceptually simple, the technical definition of things like “around” and “objectionable content” has been argued within various industry bodies to the point of yielding a very narrow definition of what might be considered “unsafe.” Those with the loudest opinions are the ones with the most at stake - typically platforms that, due to user generated content or otherwise, might occasionally (or often) render scenarios that a group of advertisers would feel is “unsafe.” This is where the platform formerly known as Twitter was in a precarious position, given platform decisions that gave ground to an increasingly large number of “unsafe” scenarios. Lacking the structural position to disproportionately influence these groups directly, a different and time-tested tactic was unleashed: A really, really rich person imposed their will on the media industry.
Objectionable as we might find this tactic, in many respects this billionaire was merely doing what many within the ads industry had done for years. Whatever idealism we may individually hold for the importance of the advertising industry, it is positively stuffed with perverse incentives. Platforms, particularly those who are entirely dependent on revenue from advertising, are incentivized to push higher user engagement to monetize at higher rates at virtually all costs, leading to occasionally questionable levels of engagement, content, and user experiences. Brands funnel pressured budgets through whatever platform can yield the best outcomes for their business as determined by quasi-objective measures that almost universally favor the highest combination of users and/or engagement can be found. The virtues of “quality,” or “depth,” or “safety” are in mind but often in the backseat - valorizing the importance of these virtues, as industry bodies such as GARM does, could often be seen as creating friction in this light. More mannered hands within the industry merely worked to smooth any friction these entities could enforce to the point of obsolescence, an industry outsider billionaire cum media magnate just blows them up.
Tempting as it may be to cluck our tongues at this act before almost immediately turning our attention back to the most tedious conversation in digital advertising (cookie depreciation), we all share some blame here. Many talk about the importance of brand safety but do all they can to live just on the edge of acceptability around it. We rail about quality and purpose within the industry but don’t rally to protect the forums that keep them in place. We talk about the importance of innovation but lock new platforms and channels into “innovation boxes” with limited budgets and unclear parameters to escape. In short, we talk about the virtues of “good” within the industry that budgets don’t follow.
The fall of GARM should be seen less as an isolated act of an erratic set of actors than a warning about the fragile boundaries of the ad industry when we “talk” more than we “walk” the virtues we extol. We’ve all but snuffed out the possibility of more platforms acting as collaborative “good guys” in the industry, because that is not what is rewarded - but it should be. We should care about associations that endeavor to protect this value and trust for the ultimate good of advertisers despite abundant incentives not to do so. We should care about platforms and channels that prioritize the value and trust of their users to the highest degree, and thereby the experience of advertising partners. We should care about the emerging corners of the digital ecosystem and foster their uniqueness rather than ask them to conform to the attributes and metrics ads have been bought on for almost 100 years. Depth and novelty of user engagement shouldn’t be experiments confined to marginal budgets to check the box on “innovation” so much as core to diverse and healthy brand portfolio and ecosystem. High reach or being the latest digital gathering place for the “youths” shouldn’t be a hall pass, and being the “good guy” shouldn’t just be the domain of challenger platforms like the Twitter I knew because they have to be - it should be the standard to which we hold all platforms. In short, the circumstances of GARM are not an anomaly but a symptom of a system which often rewards the wrong behaviors that are good for the bottom line in the short term, but bad for the digital ecosystem at large.