You don’t fix potholes by asking motorists to drive more thoughtfully

Opinion | Future of Brands Creator Economy Week in Focus

Platforms can do without quality media, and no media plan will change that. The incentives have to, writes Omar Oakes.

Every media plan is a vote.

So says Vevo’s Rich Brant, and he’s right: where advertising money goes decides which media survives, what gets made and who gets served.

Jon Watts, who runs the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement, has gone a step further. He asks whether advertisers can cast that vote in any meaningful way, given who they’re voting against.

Both are right about the problem, which is, to put it politely: our media industry is being flooded by a firehose of algorithmically served crap. This is because advertising budgets, as the latest AA/WARC figures remind us with quarterly predictability, keep moving to firehose platforms.

See? There is still some worthwhile content on LinkedIn. Where I’d like to add to this conversation is the fix – or more precisely, who is supposed to deliver it.

Because it isn’t advertisers.

Brand safety is self-interest, not stewardship

I can hear the squelching of rolling eyes as some of you read this. “Brands are just following the audiences, especially the young ones,” you shout.

Well, if it’s just about the audiences, then advertisers aren’t doing a very good job. Why are so many of them absent from some of the most popular websites on planet Earth, such as Pornhub and OnlyFans?

Because it’s not just about audiences, is it? The nature of the content clearly matters, too. Nobody has needed telling for decades that porn isn’t “brand safe”.

So why do we treat social platforms differently? Because of a legal convenience. In the US, Section 230 means platforms aren’t responsible for what their users post, which fed a comfortable assumption that “most content is fine”.

But Section 230 gives platforms legal immunity; it doesn’t give brands reputational immunity. No brand can predict where its ad will land, and no brand should trust a platform to manage that risk for it.

Yet Meta’s ad revenue keeps growing, even after Reuters reported that around 10% of its 2024 revenue came from scam and banned-product ads.

So this isn’t about virtue or being a good ‘steward’ for quality media. It’s about money, and a bad reputation carries a commercial cost.

How high a cost? Nobody has properly measured it – a job, perhaps, for a coalition for innovative media measurement?

Avoiding the bad isn’t paying for the good

Even if every brand cleaned up its act tomorrow, avoiding the bad is not the same as paying for the good.

In his response to Brant, Watts sees much of this and names the underlying problem precisely:

Someone has to pay for quality media and content, but the benefits of those investments often extend well beyond the people willing or able to pay.”

That is a textbook public good, and markets tend to underfund public safety. Motorists should drive carefully. But you don’t fix potholes by asking them to drive more thoughtfully.

Then he prescribes seven priorities, all of them voluntary asks of advertisers, agencies and measurement firms.

Let’s be honest about why this can’t work.

First, why on earth should a major advertiser voluntarily fund publishers and broadcasters beyond what its commercial return requires? It’s paying for a service; it isn’t its problem that the supply of that service is heavily concentrated and dysfunctional.

Second, the market reliably fails public-interest content because it’s expensive to make and cheap to copy. Spend months on an investigation and a rival can rewrite it by lunchtime. Spend millions on a drama and the algorithm buries it beneath someone filming their breakfast.

Nor do the platforms need quality content any longer. When it shut its Facebook News tab in 2024, Meta said news was under 3% of what people see in their feeds and that it wouldn’t strike new news deals.

Platforms should be incentivised to invest in quality media. But they simply don’t need to.

We’ve already agreed on the principle

Advertisers acting together fare no better.

GARM was a voluntary agreement on a shared floor, but Elon Musk’s X sued; the judge dismissed the case, and the World Federation of Advertisers settled anyway, pledging never to restart GARM or anything like it.

The harsh lesson? You can win in court and still lose the war.

That doesn’t make rules the wrong answer – collective problems are solved by rules, not virtue – but it means the rules need designing to resist capture by platforms and politicians alike. If the incentives lead to a public bad, then the incentives must change.

But here’s where there may be hope: in the UK we’ve long accepted that discovery – the way in which people find media content – is itself public infrastructure. Long before streaming, it wasn’t controversial for government to put its thumb on the scale and direct viewers or listeners toward some media over others.

Nor should it be now. Under the Media Act 2024, connected TV platforms must keep public service broadcasters’ content available and prominent. Ofcom’s draft code would put PSB apps within the first nine tiles of the home screen.

The interface is the message. If you’re not on the home screen, you don’t exist, however good your drama slate. Some media matters enough to guarantee a place on it.

We’ve accepted the principle for smart TVs. Why not for search, social feeds and AI assistants?

Two questions this industry can’t answer alone

I don’t have neat answers to what comes next, and I’m suspicious of anyone who claims to. But I know what the questions are:

• What would discovery rules for search, social and AI assistants actually look like?
• Who decides what counts as public-interest content online?

Neither question belongs to a brand’s media plan, and don’t hold your breath for them to be tackled on a panel in Cannes. They’re questions for governments, regulators and civil society – which is exactly why this industry keeps asking them of the wrong people.

And now AI is flooding every feed with even more cheap, forgettable, trash content. Discovery, already the bottleneck, becomes a chokehold.

The longer we wait, the less there will be left to protect.

Omar Oakes was the founding editor of The Media Leader and continues to write a column as a freelance journalist and communications consultant for advertising and media companies. He has reported on advertising and media for 10 years.