The exodus followed similar campaigns to pressure brands with ties to President Trump, like L. L.
Bean, Uber and advertisers on “The New Celebrity Apprentice.”
“Americans are now demanding that their brands articulate their values and weigh in on political issues, and I think the degree to which they are expecting
that is really quite new,” said Kara Alaimo, who teaches public relations at Hofstra University and worked in communications for the United Nations, the Treasury Department in the Obama administration, and the administration of former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.
Advertisers are increasingly in the cross hairs of populist activists — aided by the power and reach of social media — who are demanding
that brands quickly take sides on divisive social and political issues, posing a new challenge to corporations that usually prefer to stay out of the fray.
Brian Wieser, a media analyst at Pivotal Research, said
that for now, Fox News was essentially just shuffling inventory — “not unlike if you run a store and have got to figure out what shelf on which you put different products.” In the short term, the fallout could eat into revenue for “The O’Reilly Factor” as cheaper commercials replace big-spending brands, Mr. Wieser said, while the longer-term worry is that advertisers could reassess the annual budgets they spend on Fox News.
“What social media is doing is forcing companies to make these decisions much more rapidly.”
Ad boycotts are not new: provocateurs like Don Imus
and Glenn Beck lost their cable news soapboxes in part because an angry public used petitions and letter-writing campaigns to force companies to drop their sponsorship.
After a groundswell of online anger over reports that Bill O’Reilly, the Fox News host, had settled with at least five women
who accused him of harassment, more than 50 companies pulled their ads from Mr. O’Reilly’s popular prime time program.
Orkin, a pest-control company that removed its ads from “The O’Reilly Factor,” does not buy ads on specific shows but instead purchases “broad day parts on networks
that reach our target audience,” Martha Craft, a spokeswoman, said.