If the UK’s online advertising can’t police itself, who will?
Is there anything those genius Swedes can’t do? Two years of shared parental leave. Mindful twice-daily coffee and conversation. Eurovision bangers.
And now, apparently, an adtech trade body with the nerve to expel Meta. You know, the same Meta that, by its own admission, makes billions of dollars from scam ads?
For British advertising people, used to an industry that treats accountability as a reputational inconvenience, this must feel slightly unreal. IAB Sweden didn’t just vote Meta out — they did it on a Tuesday, got it thrown out on procedural grounds, came back the following day, and pushed it through anyway. They were serious about this.
In the UK, our IAB, er, gave Meta a Gold Standard.
Same organisation. Same member. Same week. Different answers.
But oddly, our industry’s trade press read it as a geography story. Sweden acted, UK didn’t, file under Nordic exceptionalism (next to flat-pack furniture) and move on.
Let’s not be fooled by geography and nationality. What matters here is a choice between two emerging strategies between how publishers deal with the direct harms caused to them from Big Tech.
