UK Broadcasters who are not the BBC depend, in part at least, on advertising revenue for their income. Getting big name brands on board, and keeping them sweet, is the name of the game, whether those broadcasters like it or not. So when your content makes some of those advertisers a little, shall we say, nervous, what would be the sensible course of action? What would a sensible person have done? What would Nietzsche have done?
This thought has not yet been allowed to enter at new broadcast entrant Gammon Broadcasting News (“
Bacon’s News Channel”), where the efforts of campaigners such as Stop Funding Hate have resulted in the channel - just three days into its tenure of the airwaves -
losing several high profile names from their advertising portfolio.
But GB News are not even considering stopping and thinking why this might be: they, and their pals in our free and fearless press have gone on the attack, full of aggression, bluster and just a hint of menace. This “
spend with us or my mates will trash your lousy brand” strategy unfolded as soon as the first dominoes began to fall.
As
Press Gazette has reported, “
Drinks companies Kopparberg and Grolsch, skincare company Nivea and the Open University have all distanced themselves from the new channel … They were later joined by Swedish retail giant Ikea and Ovo Energy”. So the main man at GB News, former Murdoch editor Andrew Neil, went on the attack.
“
IKEA has decided to boycott GB News because of our alleged values. Here are IKEA’s values - a French CEO who is a criminal with a two year suspended jail sentence for spying on staff”. Who did Brillo work for when he edited the
Sunday Times? His attack was later joined by former
Screws and
Daily Mirror editor Piers Morgan,
who declared that IKEA were “
pathetic virtue-signalling twerps”, and that he would now be boycotting them.
This became popular with the less savoury part of the right-leaning punditerati, with Brexiteer floor-crosser Kate Hoey claiming “
I certainly will not purchase anything from IKEA until they lift their boycott of [GB News]”. Washed-up has-been Tony Parsons added “
[IKEA] happily do business in a country where there is the death penalty for being gay and yet the pious flat-pack furniture merchants clutch their pearls at the idea of doing business with [GB News]”. Deeply unpleasant former
Sun editor Kelvin McFilth joined in.
“
Despite global protests Saudi Arabia has just beheaded a young man they arrested for rioting when he was 16. Ikea's local management kept quiet but over here the firm pulled ads from anti-woke [GB News] saying the station didn't meet their ‘humanistic values’. Hypocrites or what?” None of these less than totally august individuals stopped to think that many would rather like a visit to IKEA if it meant not encountering any of
them.
The result has been all that a free marketeer could have wished: Vodafone and Octopus Energy have joined the exodus, with insurer LV considering its position and Deliveroo being lined up by campaigners who point out that the brand is an England football team partner - and GB News hosts claim taking the knee is “
waging a culture war on fans”.
The latest response from the media establishment is the
Spectator (chairman - guess who) getting a droid from the planet Spiked
to attack campaigners. But it won’t work. Brillo and his pals don’t have the clout they think they have.
The slippery slope has already arrived.
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10 comments:
At least any prospective advertisers now know that should they stop paying for their adverts to run that Gammon Bastard News - the news of the National Front will slag them off. Best they never start an advert run if they don't want slagging off. Always a good idea to inform potential advertisers that they will be treated like shit by the rapidly balding and bloated Brillopad.
Also, they didn't seem to mind that the bad and evil Ikea was advertising with them in the first place... they seemed quite happy in fact, rolling in their money, right up to the point they didn't advertise with them... all rightly then! So now we know that as well as being Gammonnazi's and covidiots they are also raging hypocrites (so no change there then).
Also, and finally... did you see how baby slaphead (the kid who's giving Mr Spiked Forehead a run for his money and was let off the brexit fine because he was deemed to stupid to know what he was signing, but who's name escapes me - thankfully) had dressed his bedroom up to mimic the studio, including fake gas lights (I mean they are gaslighting the nation... but still...) so that he can larp as a real presenter on a real channel because they didn't give him a real presenters contract - LOLz.
Oh btw, I gleemed all this without watching a second... I suggest that we all nominate one person to watch and post about it so that no one else has to... we can always rotate the nominees so they don't get brain washed in to radical bald gammonnazis!
The daily hitler is pulling out all the stops to show this steaming pile of excrement for what it is not. Someone should remind them it’s like Mosley never happened.
I'm sure the high heidyins of Happy Swedish Halls Of Joy are quaking in their collective boots over the prospect of losing the custom of Kate Hooey, Tony Parsehole and Kelvin McFilth. And any prospective customers who would be likely to follow their lead won’t, because they went to the opening of the one in Edmonton* in 2012 and haven’t been heard from since.
* My late friend Mr Sunshine knew whereof he spake in referring to the place as The Death Of The Soul
"Virtue-signalling".
Yeah.
Much better than vice-signalling gammons.
Just as "do-gooders" are much better than do-badder gammons.
Fancy slagging off advertisers and expecting that to encourage others to advertise with you. Not even R.Murdoch would do that.
Why hasn't Katie Hopkins been offered a job on GB News?
Losing one prominent advertiser is bad enough. Losing several looks like gross carelessness. And then the madness of GBN is compounded further by slagging off these very advertisers you may have otherwise hope to change their minds. Much less likely now!
Besides this is not just about funding. It's about credibility as well. GBN became a parody before it went on air. Now it's already looking toxic.
I do wonder how many of the folks that say they are going to boycott ikea, Nivea, etc are the same people who were going to boycott sainsbury because they had a black family in their adverts.
I think that venn diagram would be pretty close to a si gle circle.
@Anonymous 20:11
Give it a week or two, then they’ll be hiring any old cash-strapped moonhowling loonspud. Expect James Delingpole, Julia Tory-Sewer and geographically-challenged porridge fangrrl and self-styled jellybean Isabel Talkshitte around the same time.
While poking through the back issues of Zelo Street I stumbled across this piece:
https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2020/09/has-beeb-binned-brillo.html
from September 2020. In which Brillo throws a mardy strop at the Co-op for having the temerity to state its intention to pull its ads from the foul right-wing shit-sheet that is The Spectator.
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