A long long time ago since forever everyone was boycotting stuff. Still are. Advertising platforms declared each other evil and clients convinced themselves they saw Lizzie Proctor dancing with the Devil and pulled budgets left and right. Mostly from the Left.
Younger readers might be forgiven for assuming that the current kicking Facebook is getting from the world’s most honourable advertisers is something new but I frequently had to deal with people wanting me to pull advertising from the Daily Mail for years. They called themselves “Don’t Give in to Hate” or some other Obi-Wan Kenobi quote and tried to publicly shame advertisers who used The Mail, Times, Telegraph, Express, Sun, Star, Jewish Chronicle (yes really!)….. If you tried to explain to them that putting all your budget exclusively into The Guardian and Stalinist Bugle didn’t do wonders for your unique cover you were deemed to be part of the problem. I’m all for fine targeting but unless you were flogging Levellers tickets, self-righteousness or conspiracy theories about Jewish people this strategy just wasn’t going to work.
Fortunately when all this was happening Newspaper advertising was in marked decline and you could choose not to pick sides by sticking it all online. Equally fortunately Stop the Debate (I mean Hate) were only interested in papers (much easier to burn) and hadn’t got round to noticing the Mail Online yet.
Politics was one thing. Unfortunate placement was another. In the good old days of newspapers and TV you could very occasionally get your advert placed next to a story that gave you a problem (Slim-Fast ad in a Karen Carpenter movie – True story, not me – did happen) but by then if you kept words like “Crashed”, “Massacre” or “Diana” out of your print ads you’d probably be ok.
Then Youtube fucked everything up. The Times was justifiably irked by the fact that the pesky internet was stealing all its advertising revenue and got a room full of graduates to spend their waking lives on Youtube watching Islamic extremist content (probably radicalising themselves silly) in the hope of finding some UK advertisers in and amongst all the 9/11 porn. By employing the same strategy that Veruca Salt’s Dad did to get a golden ticket the Times worked out that one in a couple of billions adverts on Youtube was a pre-roll for an Al Qaeda recruitment video:
“Exciting start-up looking for highly motivated team player with nothing in the diary from mid-September onwards – previous experience unlikely”
As I say, this was a fractional percentage of Youtube videos as the Al Qaeda Vlogger market was still in its infancy. I think Bin Laden was still releasing cassettes at the time (Now That’s What I Call Terrorism 25 and the like). The odds of your ad appearing before this sort of thing were tiny. It happened to me twice.
In the first instance my client was a bank. They’d been tipped off by the Times with a screen shot of one of their ads featuring near a fun video of a masked man in a cave, AK propped up against a rock ranting away in the usual fashion. Lots of pointing. Client went ape shit but the irony of his demeanour matching that of the chap in the video clearly escaped him. It was clear that while the Mujahedeen were not a central focus in the bank’s customer segmentation he viewed the issue as more than one of wastage. That said the video had only had about 15 views which basically accounted for its creator, his mum, 3 mates who didn’t deem it good enough to send it on and 10 kids at the Times but we still got an almighty kicking for the negative PR (of which there was none) and boycotted Youtube furiously except for when we wanted to flog bank accounts to young people.
The second instance my client was Mercedes and their ad featured near a Combat 18 video. I’ll see your, bank near a recruitment ad for Al Qaeda and raise you a German car brand desperately trying to distance themselves from their most valuable customers of the 1930s, appearing by Neo Nazi propaganda! All heil broke loose and phones and laptops slowly melted under the demand for explanations and news of how all advertising had been pulled. Fortunately it turned out the ad had not been placed there by my company but by someone at Mercedes directly. Merc gave in to hate and the culprit was properly boycotted.
Diaries Of Media 