“What the World Federation of Advertisers has done is they created a monopoly to basically tell all these advertisers how they should spend money based on certain speech.”
Rumble CEO Chris Pavlovski spoke to Fox Business on Wednesday to discuss a law suit brought by Elon Musk's X and Rumble against an ad company that has boycotted conservatives on social and digital media platforms and publishers. The issue is that the ad company has created a monopoly to "tell advertisers how they should spend money based on certain speech," Pavlovksi said.
Essentially, the Global Alliance for Responsible Media has consolidated the ad market for online media. The group places buys advertising on social media platforms but they have only fed their ads to platforms that comply with delivering the narrative GARM advocates for, which is a progressive outlook.
https://rumble.com/embed/v57qntn/?pub=2n05b
"I guess the simplest way to put it, if you're an advertiser and you don't want to advertise on Rumble or X, that's totally fine. You have the, you have the option to do that," Pavlovski said.
"But the problem happens when you have a consortium, or a group like the World Federation of Advertisers, or in their group that they created called GARM," he continued, "which then assembles all these advertisers in agencies, which creates a huge amount of power for for GARM to basically instruct these companies on whether or not and how they want to deploy brand safety standards."
Pavlovski and Musk are correct when they talk about the stranglehold GARM has on the industry. In 2022, GARM expanded their reach even further into the ad marketplace. "The Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) has opened its membership to independent brand safety solutions providers, in addition to advertisers, media agencies, media platforms and industry associations. This is a significant expansion for the cross-industry initiative, which aims to eliminate ad support for harmful content on digital media platforms," the group said.
"GARM has previously partnered with a number of ad tech companies and solutions providers on the organisation’s Brand Safety Floor and Suitability Framework, work which started in May 2020 with the IAB TechLab, also a member of GARM," they state. "After several months of collaboration and expansion of GARM’s work, the GARM Steer Team recognised the need for a more structured way of working to help further drive standards and solutions into practice." That structure is likely the facilitated boycott of platforms that GARM does not feel align with their mission. It is key to note that they do not define "harmful content."
"So what happens here is, once you have a huge consortium that creates a monopoly across all the big ad budgets that dictate a brand safety standard, they can now discriminate against certain voices on other platforms," Pavlovski said.
"If they don't like what some speech might happen on rumble or X, they can say, we're not going to touch that, which then causes advertising rates to go higher because now they're only accessing a certain portion of the market, and then drives higher prices for their shareholders and their brands," he continued.
"This harms the advertisers, the shareholders, it creates higher fees for the agencies and also harms Rumble creators and Rumble viewers in the Rumble platform," he said.
When asked what makes it illegal for an ad company to boycott platforms that allow speech the company disagrees with, Pavlovski pointed out that it's a monopoly, not just one company, but a consortium of advertisers that all go through GARM to place their ads. Ad sales are how social media and digital media earn revenue to continue operation.
"So when you have a monopoly," Pavlovski answered, "and you create a monopoly by assembling all this power and control to dictate a certain standard of how you're going to spend that money, that's not a free market. The Sherman Act does not allow that, so that's illegal. There's different rules and standards when you're a monopoly.
"What the World Federation of Advertisers has done is they created a monopoly to basically tell all these advertisers how they should spend money based on certain speech. So, you can't use the First Amendment, in a way, by having a monopoly to dictate how you're going to deploy funds. This is harmful to their advertisers. It's harmful to to the to the Rumble creators. There's a completely different set of rules when you're a monopoly. And that's how you have to look at this."
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