X CEO Linda Yaccarino said she wants to “reset the entire” advertisement industry through her and Elon Musk’s ad world antitrust lawsuit against the World Federation of Advertisers. Though Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), one of the listed defendants in the lawsuit, shut down on Friday, the social media company will still move forward with the legal action.
“Once we find out everything that happened, why it happened, what influenced this activity, there needs to be ecosystem-wide reform and a complete reset for the entire industry,” she told Axios on Tuesday. “[X] will absolutely lean in to lead and mobilize the industry … to take a new look about behaviors that are appropriate and transparent.”
Yaccarino’s statements are a follow-up to X suing the advertisers who they claim illegally conspired to boycott the platform, formerly known as Twitter. Other named defendants include CVS Health and Orsted. The WFA controls 90% of global marketing communications spending, which is roughly $900 billion per year, per their official website.
The lawsuit accuses the group’s initiative, GARM, of coordinating an ad-buy pause after Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in late 2022. GARM closed up shop on Aug. 9, saying it wasn’t financially suited to take X on in a legal battle. However, Yaccarino said GARM is merely a small piece of a much larger issues.
“GARM was just a symptom, but [finding] the root cause of the entire ecosystem being broken, that’s what the suit is about,” she explained.
In the legal documents, obtained by TheWrap, X said the “massive advertiser boycott” cost the company billions of dollars in revenue. On Tuesday, Texas District Judge Reed O’Connor removed himself from the case after reports surfaced that he owned stock in Musk’s automobile company Tesla.
Yaccarino went on to say that the advertisers’ alleged move was “an illegal coordination of efforts” against X and other conservative-leaning news and media companies.
“We were victimized by a small group of people pushing their authority or ability to monopolize what gets monetized,” she said. “The consequential nature of this indispensable platform cannot be disputed, and we urge people to make decisions on business data and facts and not any type of bias whatsoever.”
In a video she shared Tuesday, Yaccarino further stated that the lawsuit stemmed from evidence previously presented to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee.
