The FTC settled with Havas Media Group on June 30, making it the final member of the "Big Six" ad holding companies to resolve brand safety collusion allegations. WPP, Publicis, Dentsu, and Omnicom/IPG settled earlier in 2026.
The allegation: the six largest agency networks coordinated on common brand safety standards — shared content exclusion lists that determined which publishers couldn't receive ad dollars. The FTC calls it an unlawful group boycott. The complaint was filed in the US District Court for the Northern District of Texas with support from eight states.
Under the consent orders, none of the Big Six can enter agreements establishing common brand safety criteria or restrict ad placements based on coordinated standards. This closes a multi-year FTC enforcement sweep.
what brand safety actually was
Most marketers didn't realize this: brand safety wasn't a neutral, independent judgment about content quality. It was a coordinated industry output.
Organizations like GARM (Global Alliance for Responsible Media) brought together the holding companies to define categories of content deemed unsuitable for advertising. The FTC's investigation found the coordination went beyond professional guidance — it operated as a collective boycott that demonetized publishers based on criteria that were politically motivated, not just content-quality based.
Publishers covering conservative political content, certain news categories, and other topics the agencies deemed "brand unsafe" lost ad revenue at scale because all six major agency groups were working from the same blacklist. That's what the FTC ruled illegal.
The agencies called it protecting brands. The FTC called it collusion.
what happens to your settings
If you're running programmatic campaigns through DV360, The Trade Desk, or any major DSP, your brand safety vendor settings — typically from Integral Ad Science (IAS) or DoubleVerify — were built around the industry standards these agencies helped define. Those standards no longer exist as a shared framework.
This doesn't mean your campaigns start running on harmful content tomorrow. IAS and DoubleVerify still operate their own content classification systems. But the industry-level coordination that shaped what "brand safe" meant is legally prohibited going forward. Each agency must now independently develop its criteria — and the standards will fragment.
For brands managing campaigns directly on Meta or Google without a holding company agency: your platform-level brand safety controls are defined by the platforms, not by the Big Six. They're not directly affected by this settlement. The impact lands harder on programmatic buyers using DSPs.
the fragmentation problem
The settlement creates a vacuum where a shared standard used to be. Some publishers who were blocked under the coordinated system may now access inventory they were excluded from. Whether that's relevant to your campaigns depends entirely on your actual content guidelines — not the industry's.
What doesn't work now: relying on your DSP's default "brand safe" segment and assuming it reflects what you'd independently approve. Those segments haven't been updated to reflect the post-settlement landscape, and the underlying consensus that defined them has been legally dissolved.
What does work: defining your own content exclusion list explicitly, based on your brand's actual standards rather than inherited industry defaults. Most performance marketers never had to do this because the shared standard made it unnecessary. It's now necessary.
what to review
Pull your brand safety settings from every DSP you use. Find the specific vendor segment (IAS, DoubleVerify, or built-in platform controls) and look at what categories are excluded. Ask: is each exclusion something your brand independently agrees with, or is it there because that was the industry default?
For Google campaigns, check your content exclusion settings in PMax and Demand Gen campaigns. For Meta, review your Audience Controls and brand safety inventory filters. These are platform-controlled, not agency-coordinated — but this story will put brand safety back on the agenda, and you want to have thought through your own position before a client or finance team asks.
The bigger operational shift is for brands with significant programmatic spend through major agency partners. If your agency was using coordinated brand safety standards to justify placement exclusions, those justifications need to be rebuilt independently. Your brand safety rationale now has to stand on its own.
Run a free audit at gromerce.com/audit if you want visibility into where your campaigns are currently placed before you revisit those settings.
The Big Six brand safety framework is done. Whatever fills the vacuum will be messier and less consistent than the cartel it replaced — but it'll at least be something each brand actually chose.
Sources: FTC.gov, MediaPost, Ad Age, The Drum, Search Engine Land, June–July 2026
