Omar Oakes: If the UK’s online advertising can’t police itself, who will?

IAB Sweden kicked Meta out. The UK gave it a Gold Standard certificate. The gap between those two decisions is where you’ll find everything wrong with how digital advertising governs itself.

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.

What actually happened in Sweden

Bonnier News and Schibsted — the two largest news publishing groups in Scandinavia, between them owning hundreds of titles across the Nordic region — didn’t initiate the IAB case because they’d read a Reuters investigation.

They did it because Meta was using their journalists’ faces to sell crypto garbage to pensioners. Every day, their editorial teams were watching their reporters’ names and likenesses turn up in fake ads on Meta’s platforms. The wider Swedish publishers’ group filed a criminal complaint against Zuckerberg personally.

Joakim Flodin, CEO of Schibsted Marketing Services, put it plainly: “We cannot be part of an organisation that allows a company like Meta to be a member, while the company earns an estimated SEK 136 billion from fraudulent advertisements and advertising for prohibited products.”

“Earns” is the important verb here. As I argued last month, Facebook and Instagram are among the most heavily governed distribution systems ever built. The idea that there is a global deluge of scammers that making fools of this $1.5 trillion market cap juggernaut is naive in the extreme.

So any trade body that implicitly endorses this very lucrative enablement of crime is, let’s be clear, implicitly condoning scam as an acceptable business model.

The UK version of this story is embarrassing

The UK Payments Systems Regulator found Meta platforms were linked to more than half (54%) of payments scam incidents in 2023.

Press Gazette has shown that scam ad revenue on Meta in the UK likely exceeds the entire online news advertising market. The faces being stolen here belong to money-saving expert Martin Lewis and CNN’s Richard Quest — and Press Gazette joined one of the fake “Richard Quest” investment WhatsApp groups to document it.

UK publishers know all of this. They’ve written about it. They’ve documented it in granular, damning detail.

And then, earlier this month, The Times and The Sun publisher News Corp signed a £50m-a-year content deal with Meta.

Is this hypocrisy? Well, it’s certainly a calculation. A defensible one. The revenue from accommodation outweighs the cost of confrontation.

Swedish publishers ran the same numbers and landed differently — partly because they had less to gain from Meta’s goodwill, and more to lose from their editorial brands being deployed as scam infrastructure.

‘Making digital advertising better.’ But for whom?

In 2025 (also known as “just a few months ago”) IAB UK awarded Meta its Gold Standard certification — its own quality mark, its signal to the market that this member meets the highest standards in digital advertising.

Here’s what the IAB UK said about the Gold Standard when launching a 2023 ad campaign: “[it] requires certified companies to implement tools to tackle ad fraud; uphold brand safety; improve the online experience for consumers; help businesses comply with GDPR and eprivacy laws; and strengthen supply chain transparency.”

Implement tools to tackle ad fraud? But Meta was awarded after the Reuters investigation. After the criminal complaints. After the Payments Systems Regulator data.

“If this is Gold Standard, what’s sub-standard?” asked Thinkbox CEO Lindsey Clay mordantly in The Media Leader in December.

It’s a good question. So what was the answer?

Well, on Monday IAB UK CEO Jon Mew told Marketing Week the organisation aims “to work with the broadest possible membership to help make digital advertising better for everyone.”

“For everyone”?

Platforms account for 68% of UK digital ad spend — and Meta sits on IAB UK’s own Measurement Advisory Boardalongside Google, TikTok, and Amazon. The structural independence required to expel a member that powerful doesn’t exist.

You might as well ask the hotel to evict the conference.

This is what the collapse of self-regulation actually looks like

There are a hundred ‘sensible’ decisions that slowly add up to an industry that, before you know it, is no longer able to police itself.

And that should worry you — not for ethical reasons, but strategic ones.

The harm here isn’t abstract. It’s pensioners losing savings to fake investment schemes wearing Martin Lewis’s face. That story makes headlines. Most ad industry complaints don’t. Headlines make politicians act. And when the victims are voters and the industry’s response is a Gold Standard certificate, you’ve written the politician’s press release for them.

And here’s why that matters beyond ad formats and targeting rules. Advertising funds media. Media funds journalism. If the state gets to define what advertising is acceptable — which advertisers are legitimate, which platforms qualify — it acquires structural leverage over the revenue model of every independent publisher.

You don’t need to ban a newspaper. You just need to make its ad model precarious enough that it learns to moderate itself. That is not a theoretical risk. It is the logic of intervention.

Sweden kicked Meta out. The UK gave it a Gold Standard. One of those decisions is going to look smarter in 10 years.

It won’t be ours.