Months after Omnicom and Interpublic agreed to impose “ideological restrictions” on
their advertising buys as a condition of a consent decree to gain regulatory approval of their then impending merger, the Federal Trade Commission has reportedly turned its sights on other big
agency holding companies.
The story, first reported Sunday by The
Wall Street Journal and cited by a number of other news organizations, says at least three holdcos – Dentsu, Publicis and WPP – have been engaged in ongoing talks with the FTC to
refrain from allocating ad buys to media outlets based on the political content they distribute.
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An FTC attorney arguing this morning at the D.C. Circuit confirmed a report about settlements of
antitrust investigations over alleged ad boycotts.
"We are in settlement negotiations with targets of these investigations and expect settlements very soon," told the court.
The news comes weeks after a U.S. District Court judge tossed Elon Musk’s ad
boycott antitrust suit against the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), and a number of big advertisers.
The move is consistent with a number of politicized regulatory efforts
by the Trump Administration to constain the ad industry’s support of responsible news media outlets and curtail ad spending to irresponsible ones. Overall, the ad industry has shifted from
so-called “exclusion lists,” prohibiting ad buys on unsafe or unsavory media outlets to one of “inclusion,” explicitly allocating ad spending toward media publishing safe and
responsible content.
The White House push coincides with a series of probes by Republican-controlled House Judiciary Committee investigating how ad agencies place media buys based on the politics of media outlets.