Digital advertising is a $700bn (£530bn) industry that remains largely unregulated and with few laws in place to protect brands and consumers. Companies and brands that advertise products often don’t know which websites are displaying their ads. I run Check My Ads, an advertising technology watchdog, and we constantly deal with situations where advertisers and citizens have been victims of lies, scams and manipulation. We’ve removed ads from websites with serious Covid-19 misinformation, false election content, and even AI-generated obituaries.
Currently, if a brand wants to advertise a product, Google makes it easy to place the ad based on the desired reach and metrics. Technically, you can fulfill the agreement by delivering views and clicks, but you don’t provide transparent data about how and where the ad views come from. The ad may have been displayed on unpleasant websites diametrically opposed to the brand’s values. For example, in 2024, Google was found to be profiting by placing product ads on websites that promoted hardcore pornography, misinformation, and even hate speech, against the brands’ wishes.
In 2025, however, this scandal will end when we begin to enact the first regulations targeting the digital advertising industry. Around the world, lawmakers in Brussels, Ottawa, Washington and London are already in the early stages of developing regulation to ensure brands have access to legal support to ask questions, verify ad data and receive refunds. when they discover that their digital campaigns have been subject to fraud or security breaches.
In Canada, for example, Parliament is deliberating on enacting the Online Harms Act, a law to encourage the removal of sexual content involving minors. The idea behind this law is that if the content is illegal, then making money from it should also be illegal.
In California and New York, advocates are also proposing legislation that will aim to implement a “know your customer” law to track the global financial trade in advertising. This is significant because these two states drive the global ad tech industry. New York has more ad tech companies than any other city in the world. Transparency laws enacted in California, on the other hand, would affect the international advertising business of Google, by far the largest ad technology company in the world.
Beyond brand and consumer issues, the unregulated nature of the digital advertising landscape is a direct threat to democracy. In the United States, for example, spending on the presidential campaign remains unregulated. It is estimated that presidential campaigns will spend up to $2 billion (£1.5 billion) on digital advertising in 2024. Under current laws, we probably have no external data on their reimbursements or rates.
In 2025, there is legislative pressure for big tech companies to regulate ad tech.