Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

As a result of such “programmatic” buying, advertisers often are in the dark about where their ads end up. Advertisers can opt out of certain sites, of course, but only if they affirmatively place them on a blacklist of sites.

So when an ad appears on Breitbart, Sleeping Giants or one of its 109,000 Twitter followers and 35,000 Facebook followers flag the advertiser, often accompanied by an image of the sponsors’ ad next to a Breitbart story.

The other day, for example, a Sleeping Giants follower tweeted at Country Inns, informing the hotel chain that it was advertising on “the racist Breitbart site.” Within a day, the company tweeted back: “Thank you for your concern. . . . We have added Breitbart to our blacklist of ads.”

This apparently happens a lot. Sleeping Giants’ database lists nearly 2,900 companies that have declared Breitbart off limits since November — an astonishing figure, though one hard to confirm because some ad buys recur. Nevertheless, it’s not an implausible number. During one 24-hour period, advertisers such as the air-conditioning manufacturer Rheem, transport operator Caltrain, Sutter Health Plus and Rose Medical Center of Denver all publicly acknowledged that they had blacklisted Breitbart in response to a Sleeping Giants tweet....

Out-of-home has been a great venue for anti-Trump advertising this year, from the Nuisance Committee's clever billboards to Wieden + Kennedy's baloney-fixated food truck. Now, we can add an unpaid guerrilla campaign to that list, as some strikingly weird Donald-bashing posters suddenly popped up Wednesday on bus shelters in New York City.

There are five executions in all. Each poster is based on a fictional story—Dr. Strangelove, Dumb & Dumber, Humpty Dumpty, Thelma & Louise and The Shining.

Check out the ads below—in situ, as well as the original artwork. 

For starters, it’s trying way too hard to have it every which way, and trots out too much corporate blather and jibber-jabber. All that lawyer-approved disingenuousness shuts my circuits down.

Most people watching would find it interesting to know that Coca-Cola owns over 600 brands, including teas, waters, sports drinks, health drinks, and the sweetener Truvia. I love the design of the tiny cans, and the big graphic calorie counts on the front labels of the sugared drinks. All good information. But you can’t have it both ways. Exactly how deeply concerned iscitizen Coca-Cola  about "playing an important role" in addressing obesity,  when clearly it is also using this very same message to lobby voraciously on behalf of  high-fructose-syrupy, supersized drinks (which Mayor Bloomberg of New York City is threatening to kill) and against higher soda taxes?

This will take “continued effort from all of us,” says the announcer, evenly. But speak for yourself, lady. It’s a bit presumptuous to ask your customers to exert any effort in your direction. 

The root causes of obesity are so complicated, with so many possible angles (never mind Coke’s role in that epidemic)...