Out of the Box

Controlling Advertisers

By Menachem Lubinsky on April 20 2007

The Don Imus controversy is a study of marketing and public relations all wrapped into one. It took almost 9 days for CBS to dismiss a man who had been responsible for high ratings and millions of dollars from advertisers over some 3 decades. It is quite understandable why CBS hesitated before it followed its rival CNBC in dismissing Imus. In the beginning, you might say that they stuck by Imus as “hakoras hatov” for making them so much money, but once the advertisers pulled out, there was no longer any reason for CBS to drag its feet.

Sure, the media would like us to believe that their policies are shaped by principles and a set of values that makes them responsible to their public. They will also tell you that their editorial policy is independent of the advertisers that keep them in business. If that were the case, CBS would have acted within 9 minutes of the ethnic slur, not 9 days. But the important lesson here is that the advertisers really control the media and those trying to change the media’s views know that the road goes through the advertisers.

In this era of talk shows and more, there is no doubt that the hosts use an extra license to include derogatory language against some ethnic or special interest group that may be in the news. In most cases, such “insults” pass without incident. It is expected that these hosts can overstep the bounds that might be off limits for anyone else, but Mr. Imus got caught by some who had a long account to settle with him and the ill-chosen words against women at Rutgers University was the perfect excuse.

Ironically, the incident exploded just as Mr. Imus was raising millions to fight autism. He has single-handedly raised huge sums of money over the years for the cause. Conventional PR experts might have hoped that identifying with such a cause and being such a magnificent fundraising machine would offset the damage, but it was not to be. They next tried the conventional on-air apologies and that too met on deaf ears. The hand of Mr. Imus’s employers was in the end forced by the advertisers.

Why do advertisers care about public policy. Because today advertisers wish to be accepted by as broad a constituency as possible. The bigger the audience the bigger the profits. They cannot afford to have even a small part of their public express dissatisfaction with them. So when people say it’s the principle and not the money, they mean it’s the money and not the principle. This was proven again in the Don Imus fiasco.

Could a savvy PR team have extricated Imus from this mess? Perhaps, but not likely. The truth is that most people did not react to the original broadcast. It became a scandal only when the broadcast was posted on the Web. Imus probably never thought that it might be wise to apologize before it hit did the damage that it did. It may not have hit him that these remarks might come back to haunt him because he never gave these type of comments to bother him for even a second or better still, he may not even have remembered that he had ever made the comments. A person of his reputation perhaps does not take that extra second to think of what the ramifications of his remarks might be, especially if he perceived it to be part of his persona. This is after all why he is paid in the first place, to be entertaining, controversial and off the beaten track.

Essentially, the advertisers never really care about what might be said in a daily broadcast of a show they sponsor. All they know is that the ratings are high and their ad is listened to by millions of people around the country. The incredible reach is what they pay for, not the content that they may or may not agree with.

Ironically, while much of public policy is driven by public opinion, the advertisers cannot afford to play the numbers game. Even if a majority of Americans believe that Imus should not have been dismissed for his remarks, the advertisers have to be concerned with the minority. They may be shoppers of their product and the advertiser cannot afford to alienate them.

The way advertisers look at controversies like the Imus affair often does not make sense. For example, an advertiser might have chosen the Imus program because it reaches such an incredible number of people during “Drive Time.” Once the controversy broke, the advertiser’s hand was forced to cancel the ads, which leads to the firing of the radio host. But now the advertiser has lost that incredible access to the audience he so covets. That audience may now have abandoned that station during that time slot. Yet, the advertiser had no choice.

In time, Imus, if he so wishes, will be able to make a comeback either on a different station, satellite radio, or the Internet. It will probably never be the same, but you can bet that he learned a valuable lesson about “loshon horah” as we all should even if the role model does not suit us. It tells us that if such a powerful media personality could not survive, what chance would we have if we misspoke.

Many Imus fans may have abandoned the station and moved on to other programs. Some are very upset that he was fired. They may have preferred the original 14-day suspension that CBS originally chose as a method of punishment, which was good so long as the advertisers did not get involved. The challenge for the radio will be to somehow win back the Imus audience. My sense is that in the long run they will.

Out of the Box is a collection of strategic marketing articles that Lubicom has published on various topics, trends and ideas in the marketing world. The articles have been published in the Hamodia weekly newspaper circulated on three continents to a readership of well over 100,000.

The name, "Out of the Box" is a term used frequently in business nowadays to describe creative thinking that is not the norm. It is meant to help a business pull away from the pack or separate oneself from the competition. It is to some extent fraught with risk, simply because it is not the run of the mill thinking, but it is at the same time the key to reaching the next opportunity.