SUMMARY
- Publicis Groupe is one of the world’s largest ad agencies, handling advertising and PR for a wide range of corporate clients including major pharmaceutical companies.
- Publicis subsidiaries have received over $500 million from lucrative U.S. government contracts, including the CDC’s national tobacco awareness campaign.
- In 2018, Publicis Groupe led the seed round for NewsGuard, which went on to become one of the most influential companies behind advertiser blacklisting.
- Publicis once offered the use of NewsGuard’s blacklists to its clients, and, until this December, maintained a seat on NewsGuard’s board of directors.
- The company has been unresponsive to inquiries about the current status of its relationship with NewsGuard.
Headquartered in France, Publicis Groupe is one of the world’s “big five” ad agencies, which represent the bulk of corporate ad spend worldwide. Its clients include Disney, Samsung, Pfizer, Toyota, and many other international brands.
Agency Holding Companies, a visual mapping – ESKIMI
Publicis also receives large sums of U.S. taxpayer money. Its subsidiary subsidiary Plowshare Group LLC holds a $394.2 million contract with the department of Health and Human Services (HHS), for the CDC’s national tobacco education campaign. $262.4 million of the obligated funds have been outlaid so far, with the contract set to expire in September of 2025.
Publicis Groupe subsidiaries Sapient Government Solutions and OnPoint consulting, which specialize in government work, also received hundreds of millions of dollars over the years from a variety of government agencies.
As documented by FFO, the whole advertising industry, including other recipients of federal ad contracts, was deeply involved in pushing online censorship through the use of ad boycotts and blacklists. But as we shall see in the next section, Publicis Groupe’s actions proved more impactful than others.
Creating NewsGuard
In 2018, Publicis helped create one of the disinformation industry’s most influential organizations when it led the seed round for NewsGuard, a private company that that judges the credibility of thousands of news sites by assigning them “news nutrition labels.” Under the previous administration, NewsGuard received business from the Department of Defense, in the form of a $750,000 contract.
In addition to Publicis leading the seed round, Thomas H. Glocer, former Reuters CEO, Council on Foreign Relations member, and a director at Publicis Groupe, made a personal investment in NewsGuard.
As extensively documented by FFO, NewsGuard exerts influence over the media through blacklists and whitelists. It builds lists of disfavored news websites, which it calls “exclusion lists.” It then sells these exclusion lists back to the advertising industry that created it, financially suffocating the blacklisted websites.
Studies show NewsGuard’s ratings are heavily skewed against anti-establishment media sources. Its advertiser exclusion lists include some of the most prominent destinations for non-mainstream news, including Newsmax, Breitbart News, The Federalist, and One America News. While conservative websites bear the brunt, left-wing websites with an anti-establishment, anti-war tendency, like Consortium News, have also found themselves on NewsGuard’s blacklists.
A report on NewsGuard’s website reveals the company’s preoccupation with programmatic ads, claiming that $2.6bn of ad revenue goes to “misinformation websites” every year. (NewsGuard’s leading figures have spread misinformation themselves – including the pivotal 2020 lie that the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story was Russian disinformation).
As well as building blacklists for the advertising industry, NewsGuard is moving its content filters into schools and classrooms. By acquiring the 1.7 million-strong American Federation of Teachers as a client, NewsGuard ensured that its product will be used in a multitude of schools across the country.
NewsGuard also boasted that its filters are in use in 800 public libraries around the world, reaching 7 million patrons yearly. Curiously, the page advertising this, part of a large post detailing NewsGuard’s relationship with Microsoft, appears to have been removed from its website.
HealthGuard
There’s a strong incentive for an ad agency like Publicis Groupe to be involved with NewsGuard. Publicis, like other global agencies, acts as the PR and marketing representative for giant international brands. A major risk for all brands is negative media coverage.
Through its ratings system, NewsGuard hopes to be the go-to standard for determining whether media coverage (negative or otherwise) is credible and authoritative. Moreover, NewsGuard wields a potential weapon over media publishers – a bad rating from NewsGuard could mean the loss of ad revenue.
Publicis Groupe’s clients include some of the world’s biggest pharma companies, which are frequently the targets of media controversy, including COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers Pfizer, Sanofi, and AstraZeneca.
Publicis recently had to pay a high price for working with these highly scrutinized brands, when it agreed to a $350 million settlement in a multi-state lawsuit over alleged “predatory and deceptive marketing strategies” to help Purdue Pharmaceuticals sell OxyContin, fueling America’s opioid crisis.
A significant chunk of NewsGuard’s work dealt with stories and narratives of great importance to the pharmaceutical industry. NewsGuard placed a high priority on tackling “vaccine disinformation,” even after public concern over COVID-19 waned. Earlier this year, NewsGuard said it was tracking “more than 300 vaccine-related false narratives” circulating online.
Publicis Groupe deepened its relationship with NewsGuard at the height of the pandemic when it launched “HealthGuard”, a browser extension claiming to guide users on what online health sources ought to be trusted, and which ones ought to be starved of ad revenue.
In an announcement, Publicis Groupe’s health division explained that its partnership with NewsGuard guaranteed its clients access to the latter’s blacklists and whitelists:
Through the partnership, Publicis Groupe clients will gain access to NewsGuard’s Responsible Advertising for News Segments (RANS), an inclusion and exclusion tool for marketers curated by NewsGuard’s team of trained journalists. This tool provides Publicis Groupe clients with a constantly updated exclusion list to protect them from having their ads unintentionally fund thousands of misinformation and hoax websites.
Publicis Groupe’s healthcare media agency, Publicis Health Media, also recently partnered with NewsGuard on the launch of its HealthGuard browser plug-in to power a new public service campaign, “VaxFacts,” following a rise in misinformation and hoaxes relating to the COVID-19 health crisis and vaccine development. HealthGuard’s ratings and Nutrition Labels have been integrated into PHM’s proprietary process for ensuring that clients’ publishing partners meet the highest standards of content, enabling brands and consumers to more easily navigate complex health and wellness challenges more easily by relying on trustworthy publishers.
Changes at NewsGuard
Shortly after the election of Donald Trump in November, a high-profile member of Publicis Groupe, former COO Steve King, left the company after four decades. According to reports, this was not a retirement, as King still planned to stay involved in the marketing and communications industry. He had previously moved from COO to the head of Publicis Groupe’s European operations, in 2022.
King is notable for another reason: until at least early November of last year, he was on NewsGuard’s five-man board of directors. Despite the fact that the company led the seed round, no Publicis representative is currently publicly listed on NewsGuard’s board.
It is unclear what relationship Publicis Groupe currently has with NewsGuard. Has it abandoned its board seat? Does it still provide its clients access to NewsGuard’s blacklists? Is it still involved with HealthGuard? Publicis Groupe did not respond to multiple requests for comment on the matter.
These questions might also be asked of the whole ad industry. Though they weren’t as deeply involved as Publicis Groupe, two out of four of its competitors in the “big five” ad agencies used NewsGuard’s blacklists. Another agency developed an in-house blacklisting service instead.
The advertising industry has long been the censorship industry’s pressure point of choice. Many of the most draconian censorship policies on online platforms, including YouTube and Facebook, came in the aftermath of massive ad boycotts. Without advertiser pressure, online censorship has no teeth.
