Love him or hate him, there is no doubt that the election of Donald Trump is having a huge impact on just about every area of life. With his recent nomination of Steve Bannon to a top position, Breitbart News (which Bannon has run in the past) has gotten a lot of publicity, and not much of it has been good. Breitbart News is known for being a right-wing news platform, often called an ‘alt-right’ news page.
While it certainly has a large following, most people basically ignored it due to what some people think is the obvious bias, racist overtones, and a variety of other issues. Until now.
Given all the attention it has been getting, it looks like advertisers are starting to get concerned.
Kellogg’s has pulled their ads from the Breitbart News site due to concerns about ‘hate speech’ found on the site. Activists that don’t like the site claim that the page is racist and anti-Semitic.
Kris Charles, a spokeswoman from Kellogg, said, “We regularly work with our media-buying partners to ensure our ads do not appear on sites that aren’t aligned with our values as a company. We recently reviewed the list of sites where our ads can be placed and decided to discontinue advertising on Breitbart.com. We are working to remove our ads from that site.”
This is just the latest loss for Breitbart. In early November, AppNexus prohibited Breitbart from using any of their ad-serving tools. The reason given was violation of hate-speech rules.
However, Taboola, despite being contacted by the media has doubled down on their relationship with Breitbart, refusing to comment publicly but continuing to run what is potentially millions of dollars of ads on the site. While they weren’t able to give an official answer, a sales person who said he was not authorized to speak to the press, did query a sales call and mention that they had an exclusive native advertising agreement with the company, and the advertising was highly effective.
According to DigiDay, a lot of the revelations about Breitbart are coming from a Twitter account that has been exposing the sponsors:
“A Twitter account called Sleeping Giants has put pressure on advertisers, taking screenshots of advertising appearing on Breitbart, then tweeting at the companies involved. The creator of the account said he would prefer to remain anonymous to avoid being harassed by Trump supporters on the internet. He said he started the account because fake news and disinformation, are, in his opinion, two of the reasons why the election turned out in favor of Trump.”
What do you think about running ads on sites like Breitbart? Is it worth the trouble, or are there really no issues?
