21 companies pull ads from 'The O'Reilly Factor' in growing backlash
Source: CNN
"The O'Reilly Factor" is facing a growing advertiser revolt, as 21 companies have pulled their commercials from the show amid a scandal involving the host, Bill O'Reilly.
Mercedes-Benz, Hyundai, BMW of North America, Mitsubishi Motors, Lexus, Constant Contact, Bayer, Ainsworth Pet Nutrition, Orkin, UNTUCKit, Allstate, Esurance (which is owned by Allstate), T. Rowe Price, GlaxoSmithKline, Sanofi, Credit Karma, Wayfair, The Wonderful Company, TrueCar, the Society for Human Resource Management and Coldwell Banker are pulling ads from "The O'Reilly Factor" after a report about five settlements with women who alleged sexual harassment or verbal abuse by O'Reilly.
Paul Rittenberg, the executive vice president of advertising sales at Fox News, addressed the exodus in a statement on Tuesday.
"We value our partners and are working with them to address their current concerns about the O'Reilly Factor," Rittenberg said. "At this time, the ad buys of those clients have been re-expressed into other FNC programs."
The statement indicates that the companies' decisions to withdraw ads from the program have not yet hurt Fox's bottom line -- but the loss of advertisers is at the very least a public relations problem for the network and its most valuable asset.
Read more: http://money.cnn.com/2017/04/03/media/mercedes-ads-bill-oreilly/
= new reply since forum marked as read
Doesn't he have anyone around him to snatch that thing off his head & tell him to start over? Maybe make him go to Bosley?
... Fox News is not a good place for their ad dollars.
Why should their ad money support this nonsense?
The big-TV-advertising companies are finally waking up and realizing this.
Let's hope this wave continues and some of those idiots get taken off the air.
All ads are NOT created equally. Advertisers don't just buy time, they buy eyeballs of a chosen demographic. The traditional measure on television is Gross Ratings Points - GRPs. In the extreme, it's why a 30 second spot during the NCAA finals costs more than a 30 second spot during the east regional curling semi-finals. They're both sports but...
When an advertiser buys ads - they buy GRPs, not minutes. The network projects out, based on ratings, how many of those ads should go where in order to deliver the GRPs. If, at the end of the quarter, ratings come out and the network didn't deliver the GRP target - the advertiser gets airtime credit that rolls into the next quarter.
A network only has so many GRPs to sell based on the ratings throughout the day. Prime time is high GRP time and O'reilly is probably their High GRP hour. Puling an hour out of Prime like this probably costs them 20%-30% of their GRPs to these 21 advertisers - and they'll have to make that up to them next quarter with FREE airtime in less efficient slots - which means it's not just a minute for minute shift. Advertisers might get as much as 3 minutes for every minute lost just to hit the GRP target.
This is similar to what's been happening to Rush. The boycott has seriously damaged Premier, the syndication part of iHeart Radio (formerly ClearChannel). One of the ways that they addressed that, for the time being, is that his new contract reportedly pays him nothing - down from several hundred million/year in the previous contract. One reason Rush is still on is because there's nobody sitting around in the wings that can just pick up a 3 hour radio slot and deliver the ratings - listen to his show sometime when he's got a guest host...they all sound like third graders reading the words at a spelling bee. Another reason is the syndication model - if Premier were to drop Rush, they lose the "guarantee" on the 3 hour slot at 600+ radio stations. Half to 2/3rds are probably iHeart stations so they'll go with the sound track from the monkey house at the Zoo if that's what Premier servers up...but the independent/non-iHeart stations...they'll go shopping. Most of them have already loaded up on Premier's shows so the odds are they go to another network to fill the 3 hours. For iHeart - it hurts to keep rush but the archaic syndication model probably means it hurts more to dump him.
I doubt Fox has the stomach for this and, unlike Premier, Fox likely has options. An hour of TV is much more difficult to put on air vs. radio but it is much less dependent on the talking head. Pull O'reilly and drop in Bubba Gump - as long as he/she can read, the show will look/feel the same (give or take a little re: "personality"
. Radio - easier to produce but MUCH more dependent on the single individual behind the mic. Add to it that FOX is completely in control of the distribution vs. the radio syndication model and it tells me that dumping O'Reilly is much easier than dumping Rush.
IMHO, an advertiser boycott will be far more effective and swift in pushing O'reilly out (especially post - Ailes) than it has been for Rush.
I can only hope.
