The Missing Bar

Imagine a profession that manages clients' most valuable asset, charges billions annually for its expertise, and verifies the results of its own work using measurement systems it controls or recommends. A profession with no licensing requirement, no bar to clear, no examination to pass, no credential that can be revoked. No mandatory accreditation. No professional body empowered to sanction a single practitioner who overstates their results.

You'd assume I was describing something new. A regulatory grey zone like an early-stage crypto exchange, perhaps. Or a recently deregulated corner of financial services still operating on the honour system.

You'd be wrong. This is advertising. One hundred and forty years old.

Our industry has many distinguishing characteristics. And perhaps the most consequential, and the least discussed, is the almost absolute absence of professional standards.

Last week, the contradiction became acute. Five of the world's largest agency holding companies (Publicis, WPP, Omnicom/IPG (separately), and Dentsu) signed consent decrees (what any legal drama would simplify as a 'settlement') with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) banning them from coordinating on brand safety standards. The mechanism under scrutiny was GARM, the Global Alliance for Responsible Media. GARM was established in 2019 in direct response to brand ads appearing next to a livestreamed mass murder. It was a crisis response. Its Brand Safety Floor reduced harmful ad placements from 6.1% of impressions in 2020 to 1.7% in 2023. That is a measurable, meaningful improvement in the operating environment for every brand buying digital media at scale.

The FTC prosecuted it as a cartel under the Sherman Act.

One time the advertising industry produced something approaching a collective standard, it was treated as a crime.

The consent decrees run for ten years. They were produced not because the conduct was illegal (a court said it wasn't) but because the holding companies could not afford the litigation cost or political exposure of fighting a regulator aligned with the most powerful individual in their operating environment. They settled. They did not admit wrongdoing. And in settling, they made the next attempt to set collective standards legally terrifying in a way that no court ruling alone could have achieved.

This is the context in which the trade bodies are now operating. Not merely the absence of standards, but an environment in which the last attempt to create one was destroyed by a private lawsuit, then retroactively criminalised by a regulator with openly stated ideological objectives. Any association leader who reads that sequence and concludes that the lesson is "try again more carefully" deserves more credit than the ones who conclude the lesson is "don't try at all."

Global advertising spend is somewhere between $800 billion and $1 trillion annually. That money funds the information ecosystem (the journalism, the platforms, the content) that billions of people rely on every day. The agencies and holding companies handling that spend make claims to clients about reach, effectiveness, brand safety, production quality, and return on investment. Those claims are, with rare exceptions, verified by the agency or the measurement systems the agency recommends.

The absence of standards means the verification burden lands on the buyer.

In every other professional relationship of comparable financial scale, the client relies on the professional's credentials as a baseline guarantee of competence. You do not audit your surgeon's qualifications before going under the knife. You do not verify your lawyer's bar results before signing the retainer. The credential does that work. The professional body that issued it, and can revoke it, provides the assurance that allows the client to engage without performing due diligence from scratch on every transaction.

In advertising, no such baseline exists. So the CMO performs the verification function instead. Not because they are equipped to do so. Not because it is an appropriate use of their time or budget. But because somebody has to, and the industry has arranged things so that it is always them.

This makes the CMO an investor in the most uncomfortable sense of the word. An investor in an unregulated market. One where the assets are difficult to value independently, the returns are hard to attribute cleanly, and the party selling the asset is also, more often than not, providing the performance data. Every serious investor in that position builds in due diligence, independent verification, and structural scepticism. Most CMOs I know do exactly this, not because they distrust their agencies, but because the system gives them no alternative.

The cost of that due diligence is real. It is paid in time, in third-party audit fees, in the organisational energy that goes into verifying claims rather than acting on them. It is also paid in the relationships it strains, because asking your agency for independent verification of their own results is a signal of distrust, even when it is a signal of entirely rational governance.

None of this cost appears on any balance sheet. It is invisible, distributed, and chronic. And it exists entirely because the industry decided, continuously and collectively, that standards were someone else's problem.

They are not. They are the CMO's problem. They have always been the CMO's problem. The associations just never said so out loud.

The WFA describes itself as "the voice of advertisers globally." The 4As represents agencies "of all sizes." The IPA, ISBA, IAB… each has a mandate, a membership, a staff, and a dues structure. None of them require their members to demonstrate effectiveness by any independently audited metric as a condition of membership. None operate a licensing system. None have the power to remove from membership an agency that makes false effectiveness claims. You can call yourself a brand strategist tomorrow morning and nobody in this industry will stop you. There is no bar. There never has been.

The Effie Awards are the industry's closest approximation of a rigorous effectiveness standard. They are voluntary, self-reported, and entered only by agencies confident enough in one campaign to submit it. Nobody is compelled to account for the campaigns that didn't work.

Meanwhile, this industry has built an awards infrastructure of extraordinary sophistication. Cannes Lions. D&AD. The One Show. Effies. Clios. Spikes. The investment in submitting, judging, attending, and celebrating is enormous. The investment in a mandatory, independently verified quality standard for any single commercial claim an agency makes is zero.

Here is the argument I want the associations to hear, because I think it is the only one that will actually move them.

The question is not whether standards come to this industry. They will. The regulatory interest is already compounding. Privacy regulation arrived in waves and changed the business model of every company in this ecosystem. Political advertising transparency rules are tightening across the EU, UK, and United States simultaneously. AI content disclosure requirements are in active legislative development in multiple jurisdictions. Brand safety has now acquired an antitrust dimension. These are not isolated pressures. They are the early movements of a regulatory tide with nowhere else to go.

An industry that can demonstrate credible self-regulation with auditable commitments, real enforcement mechanisms and a professional body prepared to act on non-compliance retains some influence over how that regulation gets written. An industry that cannot point to a single enforced quality standard for any of its core commercial claims has none. It gets the regulation written for it, by legislators who understand it imperfectly, in language designed to satisfy a political moment rather than serve a functional market.

An industry that relies on the goodwill of regulators and the restraint of powerful platforms is not self-regulating. It is simply hoping nothing goes wrong.

That is the lesser evil the associations need to understand. Not standards versus no standards. Standards are coming either way. The choice is between standards that the industry helps design and standards imposed by people who don't. The next conference can wait.

The GARM prosecution established that competitors cannot coordinate on where ad dollars flow, even under the cover of safety definitions. That constraint is real and must be respected. But the GARM model had a structural vulnerability beyond its legal exposure: it was a collective body, and collective bodies can be litigated into closure. The next attempt needs to be built differently.

There are things the associations could do immediately that antitrust law does not prohibit. Some fundamentals, if you like:

1. A CMO's Charter.

A set of minimum commitments on data ownership, measurement methodology, and effectiveness reporting that any agency can sign independently. Clients use it as a baseline requirement in pitch processes. Agencies that don't sign it explain why. The charter creates competitive pressure without requiring the agencies to coordinate with each other on anything.

2. A shared definitions framework for content risk.

Not a boycott agreement. Not a coordinated exclusion list. Just start with a taxonomy: a shared vocabulary for categories of harmful content that each agency applies independently in its own brand safety policy. A framework that each member adopts independently, with no mechanism for enforcement against platforms, is a professional standard and not a cartel.

Neither of these require the coordination that antitrust law prohibits.

The trade bodies exist for exactly this moment. They have the mandate. They have the membership. They have, in the GARM story, a precise and recent account of what happens when you build a collective standard that a hostile actor can destroy.

Build something they can't.

And while you're at it: raise the bar. It has been missing long enough.

Here is the part the coverage largely missed last week, and it matters enormously for understanding what the consent decrees actually represent.

GARM was not killed by the FTC. It was already dead. Elon Musk killed it first.

In August 2024, Musk sued the World Federation of Advertisers and major brands including Unilever, Mars, and CVS Health, alleging GARM had coordinated an illegal boycott of advertising on X. The lawsuit alleged that GARM membership itself constituted proof of group action against the platform and that agreeing on what counted as harmful content was equivalent to agreeing to withhold commercial spending. The legal pressure and the costs of defending against it proved immediately fatal. The WFA shut GARM down within days of the lawsuit being filed, citing allegations that had "caused a distraction and significantly drained its resources and finances."

The industry's one safety standards initiative was closed not by a regulator, not by a court, not by evidence of wrongdoing. It was closed by the cost of defending itself against a lawsuit filed by the world's wealthiest man, who had a direct commercial interest in seeing it gone.

The Texas federal court then dismissed Musk's lawsuit entirely. The same conduct that forced GARM to close was subsequently found by a court not to constitute a violation of antitrust law.

And then the FTC opened its investigation.

Brandflow is written by Justin Billingsley, who has spent his career on all three sides of the industry's table: senior client, global agency leader, technology founder. First published 27 April 2026 in the Brandflow newsletter on LinkedIn.