by Kate Cooper, Programmatic
As LHF (Less Healthy Foods) advertising regulation reshapes the UK advertising market, one question continues to divide the industry: who is responsible for ensuring programmatic creatives are compliant?
The legal answer appears straightforward. Regulators generally place primary responsibility on the advertiser — the brand promoting the product. If an LHF campaign breaches advertising rules, the advertiser is usually the first organisation asked to explain how and why the ad was approved. Programmatic advertising complicates this as delivery is distributed across multiple layers of technology, agencies, publishers, and automated systems.
From the advertiser’s perspective, complete control is difficult to achieve. Modern campaigns can involve multiple DSPs, dynamic creative tools, audience data providers, exchanges, and hundreds of publishers. Brands may argue they are acting responsibly by approving compliant creative assets, applying audience restrictions, and relying on specialist agencies and platforms to execute campaigns correctly.
Media agencies often see themselves as the operational managers of compliance risk. Agencies typically configure targeting, manage inclusion and exclusion lists, oversee contextual controls, and monitor campaign delivery. Because they directly control campaign execution, many believe they share significant responsibility for ensuring LHF compliance.
Yet agencies do not fully control the environments in which ads ultimately appear. Audience data can be probabilistic, inventory metadata may be inaccurate, and placements can shift within milliseconds through real-time bidding systems.
Ad tech platforms take a different view. DSPs, SSPs, and exchanges usually position themselves as infrastructure providers rather than legal decision-makers. They offer tools such as contextual targeting, age-gating, brand safety controls, and reporting systems, but often stop short of guaranteeing compliance. This distinction matters because most programmatic technology operates on signals and probabilities rather than certainty. Platforms may facilitate compliance but rarely accept sole responsibility for determining whether a campaign is lawful.
Publishers also sit in a difficult position. While they control the environments where ads appear, many programmatic transactions happen automatically through exchanges with limited visibility into campaign-level decisions. Publishers may block categories or label child-directed content, but many argue they cannot realistically verify whether a specific product or audience strategy complies with HFSS rules.
Increasingly, legal experts believe LHF enforcement is moving toward a shared responsibility model. While advertisers remain primarily accountable, regulators are paying closer attention to whether agencies, platforms, and publishers applied reasonable safeguards and acted responsibly within the areas they controlled.
In practice, LHF compliance is no longer simply a creative approval issue. It has become a supply chain governance challenge involving brands, agencies, technology providers, and media owners. The industry’s broader challenge is that programmatic advertising was built for efficiency and automation, not necessarily regulatory transparency.
As LHF enforcement evolves, companies across the ecosystem are likely to face growing pressure to demonstrate clear processes, stronger controls, and documented compliance efforts. Ultimately, responsibility may not rest with one party alone. Instead, the future of LHF compliance in programmatic advertising will depend on how effectively the entire ecosystem can manage risk together.
