Digital ad industry backs a new alliance to self-regulate online safety - Axios

Dozens of the world's biggest advertising and content companies, including major tech firms, brands, ad agencies and industry groups, announced Tuesday their commitment to a newly-created alliance to take significant steps to improve digital safety.

Why it matters: It's the biggest and most comprehensive industry effort to date to tackle the ongoing brand safety crisis online. Competing groups are putting their differences aside to solve the problem quickly in the face of global regulatory threats.

"Because we don't know what the regulation is going to look like, we want to get out front and figure out how to solve the problem."
— John Montgomery, EVP of Brand Safety at GroupM

Details: The immediate focus of the Global Alliance for Responsible Media is to create a working group that will prioritize a set of concrete steps to begin creating a set of actions, processes and protocols for protecting people and brands from nefarious content online.

The big picture: The coordinated industry effort comes as lawmakers around the world debate potential regulations for the digital advertising and content industries.

Be smart: While talks of growing regulation make new laws and rules feel inevitable, the advertising and digital content industries have been particularly good at coming together to self-regulate when their industries face existential crises.

Between the lines: One of the goals of the Alliance would be to create cross-industry brand safety standards that Big Tech companies would use when evaluating content online.

Our thought bubble: We've seen several times in recent weeks that different standards across platforms about what type of content is considered safe on the internet causes confusion and frustration among lawmakers, brands and consumers.

Go deeper: Big Tech's shifting lobbying army

https://www.axios.com/advertising-safety-global-alliance-for-responsible-media-4db5891c-b75a-4b5f-8422-5c96549db932.html