Beck has been running show after show shining light on the roaches that President Obama has brought to the White house with him. As a result of this activity and a statement that Beck made on another Fox show saying that President Obama “was a racist,” an ultra left group has attempted to organize a boycott of advertisers of Beck’s show.
As a counter, there have been numerous sites that have published information about advertisers who have left Beck’s show. The idea was to counter boycott the advertisers that had removed their advertising from Beck.
I wrote to several of the advertisers telling them of my disappointment with their bowing to an obvious minority that did not believe in free speech. I suggested that they may want to reconsider their ad buys as there were clearly more folks watching the show than those involved in any boycott.
I got responses from all of the companies. Nearly all of them were the generic “thank you for your letter.” From there, most of the letters said that they hadn’t pulled any advertising from Beck’s show. I know there’s been some confusion about who has or hasn’t actually pulled anything from Beck’s show so it’s hard to say who’s telling the truth and who’s not.
I got one response however, that I thought was pretty novel. Here is the response I got from Progressive Insurance:
Dear Mr. Shoebox:
Recent media reports have created the incorrect impression that Progressive pulled advertising in response to specific comments made on The Glenn Beck Show, but that is not the case. The fact is that we did not intentionally place any of our advertising on the show, so when we learned that our ad had aired, we corrected the error.
Our goal is to reach a broad range of drivers to make them aware of our products and services. We value feedback on our advertising strategy, but because auto insurance is a very competitive business, we don’t discuss everything that goes into our ad placement decisions. We’d like to thank you for taking the time to express your opinion.
(emphasis mine)
So Progressive, let me see if I got this right. You didn’t specifically ask to have your ad run on Beck. But, when you made your purchase of a “run of network” which gives Fox the ability to decide when to run your ads and which gives you a cheaper price per ad while still getting the higher priced shows i.e. Beck’s, you were perfectly happy allowing Fox to put your ad on Beck’s show. However, once you found out about the controversy you immediately said “don’t run our ad on Beck!”
Interesting. Progressive claims they didn’t “cancel” advertising with Beck, they merely “corrected a mistake.”
I always thought it was just the political “progressives” who were unable to deal with truth and facts. Apparently, truth is hard to come by even if your name is Progressive!
