Author Topic: When Media Advertising Boycotts Backfire  (Read 520 times)

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Offline Ptarmigan

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When Media Advertising Boycotts Backfire
« on: April 10, 2020, 04:15:56 PM »
When Media Advertising Boycotts Backfire
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/04/10/when_media_advertising_boycotts_backfire_142918.html

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Sleeping Giants is far from a household name, but the small organization has had an outsize impact in the Trump era. After being dismayed by the result of the 2016 election, Sleeping Giants was founded by two advertising industry veterans, Matt Rivitz and Nandini Jammi, to organize boycotts of conservative news organizations via social media campaigns.

Though the group has a small social media following – 254,000 Twitter followers, which isn’t a lot in relative terms – it has succeeded in getting at least 20 major advertisers to abandon Tucker Carlson’s program on Fox News, and by some estimates it’s responsible for reducing the ad revenue at Breitbart.com by 90%. (In the interest of disclosure, my wife is a contributor to Fox News.)

Now, however, it seems that Sleeping Giants’ boycott campaigns, and others like it, are resulting in an unintended – but predictable -- consequences. In the Internet era, advertisers have the luxury of being incredibly specific about what content they choose to advertise on. They do this by targeting content with “keywords” that identify news or content they want their ads to appear next to, or alternately identify content they don’t want to be associated with. And increasingly, advertisers are shying away from placement in any stories with controversial keywords, even when it means avoiding the biggest news of the day.

Unintended consequences.
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Aside from “coronavirus,” Jammi lists some other keywords and phrases advertisers are blacklisting: shootings, plane crashes, raising the minimum wage, Trump, lesbians, trans people, blood, and murder. According to an article in The Guardian earlier this year, advertiser “blacklists are ballooning in some cases to as many as 3,000 or 4,000 words, blocking ads from many different stories,” and extensive keyword blacklists cost publications in the U.K. over $210 million in ad revenue last year.

Advertisers avoiding all controversial topics may well be devastating to journalism, an industry long beset by financial difficulties. What’s astonishing is that the co-founder of Sleeping Giants would be so clueless that she “never imagined” this would be the outcome of media boycotts.

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By using such exclusionary tactics, Sleeping Giants and their progressive allies have inadvertently tapped into an Internet phenomenon known as “the Streisand effect” – essentially, attempts to censor end up further publicizing the person or information being censored. Republican voters have argued for decades, and with some merit, that the media and other institutions are biased against them. Things are now so polarized that liberal attacks on conservative news sources now practically serve as an endorsement.
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