The regulatory insider

The UK advertising watchdog has banned two Toyota adverts for condoning driving that disregards its environmental impact in a landmark ruling, stating that the SUV ads had been created without “a sense of responsibility to society”.

UK newspaper The Guardian announced a host of new ad solutions at its Upfronts presentation this week, including a new offering geared specifically towards audiences which have opted out of data collection within its GDPR consent mechanism. The Guardian says the new formats are based on what it sees as the three key pillars of its offering for advertisers: scale, influence, and integrity. The cookie-free offering, called Guardian Light, plays into the last of these three pillars – enabling advertisers to reach audiences while respecting withdrawal of consent.

New measures to support UK radio on smart speakers have been welcomed by the radio industry following the announcement of a new Media Bill in the King’s Speech on Tuesday 7th November. The Media Bill also includes clauses that tie up elements of commercial radio deregulation, which were announced originally by the government in 2017. These will update requirements around outdated music formats, local production rules and local news on digital platforms.

Big Tech firms will face new European Union rules to clearly label political advertising on their platforms, who paid for it and how much and which elections are being targeted, ahead of important votes in the bloc next year. Violations can be punished with fines up 6% of an ad provider's annual turnover

The sports betting sector has offered to remove logos from football club match-day jerseys amid an intense stand-off with the government over a looming clampdown on gambling advertisements. The government has modelled the financial impact of a blanket ban on TV and digital advertising – the most extreme proposed intervention that has gained support from crossbench MPs and anti-gambling advocates. Opposition Leader Peter Dutton told this masthead in May he believed sports gambling promotion would one day be treated like the spruiking of tobacco products.

The latest Kantar Sustainability Sector Index report underlines the lack of trust consumers have in companies' sustainability efforts for most products across all industries. “Born-good” sectors, like electric vehicles and alternative meat products, are notably still believed by a majority of consumers to be misleading in their sustainability advertising, according to the report. "Half of global consumers believe brands across all sectors are greenwashing their activities, putting customers’ trust at risk through miscommunication and misguided strategies,” said Karine Trinquetel, Kantar’s global head of offer for sustainable transformation practice.

It’s what’s keeping publishers up at night: the potential erasure of even more of their online traffic as search potentially shifts from solely delivering article links in response to user queries to promoting direct answers from generative AI-type technologies.

Taboola CEO Adam Singolda lists five things that will help publishers more than make projected losses from SEO’s downward shift.

The EMFA Report was adopted in Plenary on October 3rd. Significant changes were introduced in articles 23 (audience measurement) and 24 (state advertising [and purchases]). The text now goes into Trilogues during which a final version of the Regulation must get support from the co-legislators.

You can rightly complain about online monopolies like Google. But when you really think about what advertising wants from media, it's not more competition, writes the editor. “Competition is for losers,” wrote PayPal co-founder and Mark Zuckerberg ally Peter Thiel nine years ago. Thiel’s argument is that monopolies are more stable, long-term businesses, and they have more capital. And, if you get a creative monopoly for inventing something new, it means you’ve created something really valuable. The problem is, according to Thiel, monopolies tend to lie. They don’t want the government to regulate them, so they won’t call themselves a monopoly.

 Amazon  Prime Video will next year join streaming rivals in rolling out ads and introducing a higher-priced ad-free tier, as the industry grapples with a slowdown in subscriber growth since the pandemic. The U.S. tech giant said on Friday [September 22nd] ads will be introduced in the U.S., the UK, Germany and Canada in early 2024, followed by France, Italy, Spain, Mexico and Australia later in the year. Amazon's ad-free tier will cost another $2.99 per month in the U.S., where a Prime subscription currently costs $14.99 per month, or $139 per year. Pricing for other countries will be shared later, the company said.

Adland isn’t exempt from the legislation that’s coming down the pike. Carbon emissions from a company are broken down into scopes. Scope 1 is the direct output of pollutants by a company—think vehicle exhaust. Scope 2 is the pollution made by the energy a company buys like electricity to power the office. Scope 3 is all the other pollution linked to a company’s activities, but not directly created by them, like emissions from vendors. Both the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and California Legislature are targeting all three scopes of emissions.

Apple has bowed to the inevitable and said it “expects to make” App Store policy changes to comply with EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA). It said that future changes could also affect how the company charges developers for access to its platforms; how it manages distribution of apps outside of the App Store; and “how, and to what extent, it allows developers to communicate with consumers inside the App Store regarding alternative purchasing mechanisms.”

The draft bill, which Hungary’s ruling Fidesz party is expected to submit on Tuesday, is set to propose creating a new office tasked with investigating activities that threaten Hungary’s “sovereignty”. The government has shared few details about its plans. But the Fidesz leadership has indicated that the new legislation could apply to foreign funding of political parties, and possibly also media outlets and civil society organisations that it has accused of operating under the influence of Washington and/or Brussels.

Facebook and Instagram are launching a paid ad-free subscription in the European Union, which costs about €9.99 per month on the web or €12.99 per month on iOS and Android. The subscription is meant to address concerns by the European Union about Meta’s ad targeting and data collection practices. By making users choose between paying for the service to remove ad targeting or using the service for free but consenting to its data collection practices, Meta believes it will have more clearly and definitively met privacy requirements set by a collection of European data laws, including the Digital Markets Act and GDPR.

Authorities agree that climate change will never be effectively addressed if ordinary consumers don’t make responsible choices. But there’s a problem: Those ordinary people also tend to assume their choices aren’t going to make much of a difference. In IPG Mediabrands and Teads, Foley believes Project Drawdown has found those allies. The first consumer survey from the group highlights where strategic media could have the greatest impact, laying the groundwork for future campaigns to spur behavior change that will reduce emissions. IPG will also share its findings with clients that want to support climate action through their media buys, highlighting where profitability and consumer emission reductions align for brands.

Alex Cone, product manager for the Google Privacy Sandbox, addressed the industry's burning questions during AdExchanger’s Programmatic IO. Responses include more insight into Google's timeline for cookie depreciation and protected audiences.

In a recent letter to EU watchdogs, Google warned it won’t accept the mandatory divestment of part of its services deemed by Margrethe Vestager, the bloc’s currently-on-leave antitrust chief, as “the only way” to restore competition. Google is set to formally oppose the EU’s June statement of objections before the end of the year, said a person familiar with the content of the letter, who spoke on condition of anonymity. The EU case is a direct attack on the black-box of online advertising where Google automatically calculates and offers ad space and prices to advertisers and publishers as a user clicks on a web page. The European Commission declined to comment. A Google spokesperson didn’t comment beyond referring to a previous blog post in which the company said that the EU’s complaint doesn’t “recognize how advanced advertising technology helps merchants reach customers and grow their businesses.”

Barb has upgraded its API to include all data available in its panel viewing file, including non-linear viewing on broadcaster video-on-demand (BVOD), subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) and video-sharing services and viewing on PCs, tablets and smartphones. The upgrade also means that Barb clients can now use the API to conduct longitudinal analysis across all services and platforms, such as using dynamic targets, calculating campaign reach and frequency and analysing series performance. 

Ofcom has announced that it will not remove any of the stricter TV advertising rules which apply only to commercial public sector broadcasters, placing lower limits on the amount of ads they’re able to run. “While we remain of the view that there may be merit in harmonising TV advertising rules by relaxing the additional restrictions on PSBs, we have decided to retain the status quo for the time being,” the regulator said in a statement.