Attorney General Brenna Bird Secures Victory to Restore Competition and Free Speech in Digital Advertising

DES MOINES—Attorney General Brenna Bird announced a decisive victory to stop the nation’s largest advertising agencies—known as the “Big Six”—from unlawfully manipulating the digital public square and suppressing free speech.  

The Big Six are the world’s largest advertising, marketing, and media-buying holding companies who control hundreds of individual agencies and billions of dollars in global annual ad spend. 

Starting in 2018, these advertising companies—Havas Media Group USA, WPP, Publicis, Dentsu, Omnicom, and IPG—illegally imposed what they called “brand safety” standards across the digital advertising industry. Ad agencies agreed to adopt the standards and stopped purchasing digital advertisements on websites containing what they classified as “misinformation.” The advertisers created organizations that determined which opinions were disfavored and used that information to target the companies’ advertisers. 

The result was that certain news and opinion sites lost the ability to earn money, particularly conservative publishers, because they were denied critical digital advertising revenue. Advertisers lost the benefits of competition since they had fewer media options to choose from, and American consumers were denied the benefit of a competitive media marketplace.  

“Iowans have a right to make their own decisions about what they read and buy with their hard-earned money,” said Attorney General Bird. “These advertising giants thought they could secretly rewrite the rules by denying digital publishers ad revenue simply because they disagreed with their viewpoints. This settlement restores competition between ad agencies and is a massive win for the First Amendment.”   

Iowa joined the federal antitrust complaint alongside the FTC, Florida, Indiana, Montana, Nebraska, Texas, Utah, and West Virginia. The settlement mandates the largest U.S. advertising agencies will be strictly prohibited from agreements that set common brand safety standards or restrict advertising based on biased, ideologically driven, or politically motivated criteria.  

The complaint and proposed final order were filed in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas. 

Read the final order here.  

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For More Information:

Contact: Jen Green | jen.green@ag.iowa.gov