‘Radicals on the left and right, abetted by giants like Apple’ are gunning for online ads, claims IAB CEO David Cohen
In an extraordinary keynote at the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s annual leadership meeting event in Florida last week, CEO David Cohen branded privacy activists, academics, politicians of both left and right, and even Apple as “extremists” for criticising the ad industry and supporting tighter privacy legislation.
“Extremists are winning the battle for hearts and minds in Washington DC and beyond,” said Cohen. “We cannot let that happen. These extremists are political opportunists who’ve made it their mission to cripple the advertising industry and eliminate it from the American economy and culture.”
The online advertising industry is seriously worried about the momentum of privacy legislation in the US, where five states are introducing GDPR-style rules that require consumers to opt-in, and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has vowed to crack down on tracking.
Cohen used the word “extremist” ten times in his speech, which has been released online. He also branded the argument that online tracking is used to shape behaviour and society put forward by Shoshana Zuboff, author of the influential book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, as “dystopian nonsense” and “insane.”
He took aim at anti-surveillance statements made by FTC chair Lina Khan, and, seemingly trying to separate advertising from “big tech” (even though Google, Meta and Amazon are IAB members), accused the regulator of endangering “the free and open internet” in its zeal to “punish the big players”. Last summer the FTC promised to crack down on “commercial surveillance and lax data security practices.” One advertising company told The Drum 2023 is a “point of inflection”.
Turning to US politicians, Cohen said the likes of Amy Klobuchar (Democrat) and Ted Cruz (Republican) will “throw our industry under their campaign buses.” Both have called for more regulation of social media, albeit for different reasons.
He also laid into Asad Ramzanali, chief of staff White House office of science and technology policy, and Democratic congresswoman Anna Eshoo for characterising online ads as “a means for misinformation and inciteful speech to proliferate and hurt people.” And he hit out at Republican Cathy McMorris Rodgers for claiming the industry is “part of big tech’s control over speech that limits consumer choice and drives addiction.”
He attacked pressure group Accountable Tech, as “one of the more virulent anti-advertising groups trying to shut down the ad-supported internet”, accusing it of being funded by “progressive dark money,” and saying the IAB’s own lobbyists were hard at work in Washington pushing for “serious, common-sense legislation”.
