In this op-ed, Venessa Hunt, CEO of Fixer & Future, argues the advertising industry has prioritised efficiency over ethics, continuing to fund platforms accused of harming children, and that real change will only come when CMOs decide the cost of inaction is too high.
In 2016, I stood on a stage and asked the Australian advertising industry whether it was funding the bullies.
I wasn’t talking metaphorically. I was talking about the platforms we were pouring money into. The ones with the reach, the targeting, the CPMs that made every media plan look efficient, every CMO look smart and every CFO happy. The ones we all knew were built on engagement mechanics, but didn’t want to admit were also rewarding outrage, comparison, and the specific psychological brutality of social validation and its removal.
The room nodded. A few people came up afterwards. Some said I was brave. Not many people moved their money.
I wrote the open letter. An op-ed to say it more concretely for those who weren’t in the room. Then, I ran ThinkPremiumDigital and made the case, loudly and repeatedly, that premium environments weren’t just ethically preferable, they were commercially superior. That chasing the cheapest CPM was hollowing out brands, funding fraud, and financing harm.
The industry listened politely. Then kept spending.
So here we are. 2026.
Last month, a Los Angeles jury found that Instagram and YouTube were not accidentally addictive. They were designed to addict children. Not a glitch. Not an unintended consequence. A deliberate architectural choice, made by adults in offices, reviewed in internal research that leadership read and filed away.
The same week, Meta was poised to overtake Google as the largest recipient of digital advertising revenue in history.
How can both of those things be true at the same time? Does no one care?
A court has found, with twelve jurors and the full weight of evidence, that a platform engineered its product to exploit the developing neurology of minors. And the industry’s response has been to make that platform the most financially rewarded entity our business has ever produced.
Mark Ritson wrote last week that Meta has achieved genuine institutional immunity. That the average marketing manager has never planned a quarter without Meta under legal scrutiny and never planned a quarter in which Meta didn’t deliver. That the moral choice was made for them, by the industry, long before they arrived.
He’s right. And it’s a brilliant diagnosis.
But I want to add something he can’t.
I was there when the choice was being made.
I was inside the world’s largest advertising agency. I was then running the body set up to argue for the alternative. I had the data, the stage time, the trade press columns, and the ear of people who controlled hundreds of millions of dollars in media investment.
And I can tell you exactly what happened when you raised this in rooms that mattered.
You were heard. You were respected. You were offered a coffee. And then the media plan went out exactly as it was.
Because the machinery of our industry is not designed to make moral decisions. It is designed to make efficient ones. And efficiency, in digital media, has been defined almost entirely by the metrics these companies are best at delivering. That is not an accident either.
After a decade of asking, I know this much. The industry does not change from the inside out. It changes when the cost of not changing exceeds the cost of changing. That’s it. That’s the whole mechanism.
We’ve seen it before. Tobacco didn’t change overnight; they didn’t voluntarily stop selling cigarettes because it was the right thing to do. Change came through courts, through verdicts, through the slow collapse of social licence until the status quo became legally and reputationally untenable. These jury verdicts matter for the same reason. Not because they will immediately shift media budgets, but because they have started moving the cost calculation.
So who in Australia is going to lead this?
The AANA, the MFA, the IAB? These are organisations led by people I respect, doing genuinely important work for our industry. But setting a regulatory or ethical standard on platform investment is not their role, and it was never designed to be. This is not a problem that trade bodies can or should solve.
There is another reason Australian agencies won’t move first, and it has nothing to do with courage. Many operate under client spend agreements negotiated at global headquarters, in New York, London, or both, that lock in platform allocations well above what any local market director can unilaterally shift. They will say the right things. They will express, with feeling, that children matter. The media plan will not change.
Which leaves the CMO.
Specifically, the Australian CMO. The one whose board hasn’t asked the question yet but will. The one with enough tenure to absorb a short-term performance dip. The one brave enough to move first, and who will be the one everyone else quietly points to when they finally follow.
The brands that moved money away from X when its content moderation collapsed showed exactly what that leverage looks like in practice. They did it because the reputational risk became visible and the permission was granted.
Two jury verdicts finding a platform guilty of designing products to addict children should clear the same bar.
Start small. Test a modest reallocation of your spend into environments not currently under indictment for harming children. Measure it properly. Use it as proof of concept for the conversation your board is eventually going to force you to have anyway.
The verdicts are not finished. The litigation pipeline is full. The regulatory environment is tightening. And when the cost calculation finally shifts enough that the industry moves, everyone will say they saw it coming.
Some of us did. We said so. Loudly. For a decade.
The jury just confirmed we were right.
The question now isn’t whether the harm happened. That’s been decided.
The question is what you do the morning after a verdict?
Nobody is going to make that decision for you. Not a columnist. Not a conference. Not even a jury.
Just you. And what you can live with.
Written by Venessa Hunt, CEO of Fixer & Future
