The moral maze of boycotts…and taxing Facebook

YouTube: one of many media organisations experiencing boycotts

We have entered a complicated world where advertisers’ media budgets are under intense scrutiny, writes Dominic Mills – and they better get used to it. Plus: the plan to hold Facebook to account.

It was just over six years ago that a concerted boycott of the News of the World by advertisers – some on their own accord, some responding to growing pressure from consumers – put the final nail in the coffin of the newspaper.

As of last month, the boycott game is back – and it may be here to stay. Case #1 is the successful campaign by activist group Stop Funding Hate to pressure Paperchase into withdrawing its ads. This followed earlier victories against Lego and other advertisers. Its technique? To use social media to bully and to threaten. Its aim is to commercially damage the Mail and other papers (the Sun and Express) it regards as abhorrent.

Case #2, meanwhile, is the boycotting last week of YouTube by brands like Adidas, Diageo, Mars and Lidl following revelations by The Times that their ads had appeared against content linked to paedophiles. This followed another advertiser boycott of YouTube earlier this year, a charge also led by The Times.

The two are very different – the former involuntary, the latter voluntary – but so far, extraordinarily, the public seems not to care.

While The Times does not explicitly call for advertisers to boycott YouTube, it is nevertheless happy if they do. After all, it is in its commercial interests to damage Google and it is happy to use the court of public opinion to do so. Does that then make it like Stop Funding Hate?

Curiously, for an organisation that seeks to take media that spread hatred to task, Stop Funding Hate has ignored the YouTube case – even though advertisers are, in its frame of reference, supporting material that promotes extremism, anti-semitism, racial hate and paedophilia.

You can check out its website here where any mention of YouTube is weirdly absent. Zip. Nada.

Why? Is it because advertising on Isis/extremist and paedophile-attractive places on YouTube is ok? Does, even, Stop Funding Hate approve of such content? Or is it because, versus the Mail and its friends, Google is one of the good guys?

I have no idea, but I think Stop Funding Hate may be playing some complicated game of moral equivalency which is all about the platform/publisher and nothing to do with the content.

All this demonstrates that we have moved into a complicated world where advertisers tread a fine line and their media budgets are under intense scrutiny. Not just what they say, but where they say it. They better get used to it. They’ve become political footballs, as liable to be kicked around by politicians as social activists.

So how do they steer a route through this moral maze? Like Brian Jacobs, I believe advertisers should make their decisions based purely on a commercial and/or audience rationale (and good for John Lewis for telling Stop Funding Hate to naff off).

They can also argue that, as long as the content they advertise around is legal, then they can be free to go where they want. But I accept that these arguments don’t necessarily cut any ice with determined activists.

But how should advertisers react when and if the activist organisations get their teeth into Google and YouTube? Clearly, they can offer advertisers a powerful commercial and audience rationale.

The legality question is altogether messier. So long as they can avoid classification as publishers, Google, Facebook and Twitter cannot be held to account in the same way as newspapers for content that they (let us put it this way) allow to be published.

But even if they can hold this line in law, I wonder how much longer they can in the court of public opinion. It may be then that advertisers’ resolve is really tested.

A new way to tax Facebook

Thinking of moral mazes, let’s talk tax and Facebook. It was Louis XIV’s finance minister who memorably coined this phrase: “The art of taxation is about picking the most feathers from the goose with the least hissing.”

Tax also needs to be seen to be fair (hence the American Revolution sparked by unfair taxes imposed by Westminster), which is why Silicon Valley’s protestations that its tax payments are entirely legal butter no parsnips (as my gran used to say).

So I was intrigued to see this piece in The Times last week on Treasury proposals to tax Facebook on the number of its UK users rather than allow it to continue its controversial smoke-and mirrors arrangements.

This is genius because, as readers of this column know, Facebook habitually inflates its user numbers – not just here but in the US too.

The prospect of Facebook being hosted by its own untruth is just exquisite, and the more it hisses the better.

Late is better for Christmas ads

Like me, I expect, you have spent most of November thinking to yourself: “Ok, I know all the big High Street names have launched their Christmas ads. But when are we going to see the cheap-and-cheerful bunch of Poundland, Iceland and the Co-op?”.

Worry no more. As of of 1 December, they’re all out, and I’m with the woman from the Co-op who told Marketing Week that there’s no point launching a Christmas ad in November.

No, the beginning of December is the date, and apparently this is the day most Britons believe marks the official start of Christmas.

That sounds like a bit of retro justification to me, but it makes sense for many smaller advertisers to delay as long as they can. One, they’re not fighting for attention with the big players; two, there’s less risk of wear-out or ad blindness; and three, certainly for food retailers, do people actually plan their food buys more than three weeks ahead?

If the squeeze on household budgets means consumers delay their purchasing, then these ads have a better chance of achieving top-of-mind recognition.

And cheap and cheerful these ads certainly are, with Poundland claiming its ad cost £65,000 to make and has an airtime budget of £415,000, a tenth the cost of John Lewis’s effort.

All three use real people (so much cheaper), but whereas the Co-op and Poundland are bounded by normality, Iceland borders on the barking mad. Below, you can see five-year-old Isla wriggle with excitement as she unwraps a gilded turkey. The same trick is repeated over various star Iceland products, among them rock lobster and pavlova.

The Mirror wonders whether these are the just plain creepy, and the Sun calls them weird. Iceland, meanwhile, says they are an antidote to the usual tear-jerking blockbuster. They certainly are.