Boycott campaign has already attracted major outdoors-products firms and iconic ice cream maker.
Global products giant Unilever, which reported spending $9 billion on ads and marketing last year, on Friday became the latest large company to pull ads from Facebook over content on the platform. Telecommunications firm Verizon on Thursday also joined a pressure campaign to force the Menlo Park social media titan to take action against content seen as racist and divisive, saying it was pulling ads indefinitely.
Unilever’s withdrawal of U. S. Facebook ads will last till the end of the year, and the European conglomerate said it would also stop buying ads on Twitter for the same time period. “The polarized atmosphere places an increased responsibility on brands to build a trusted & safe digital ecosystem,” Unilever tweeted Friday morning.
The company in 2018 threatened both Facebook and Google with a withdrawal of ads, over extremist content on the Silicon Valley companies’ platforms.
According to market-research firm eMarketer, U. S. spending on digital advertising this year is expected to top $134 billion, and Facebook is expected to haul in 23% of U. S. digital advertising revenue.
“Unilever’s announcement is notable, first because as one of the largest advertisers in the world, it has enough influence to persuade other brand advertisers to follow its lead, as they have sometimes done in the past,” eMarketer analyst Nicole Perrin said Friday in an emailed statement.
“It’s also notable because Unilever is going beyond what the organizers of the boycott have called for, in several ways. It’s pulling back spending for longer, on more platforms (including Twitter) and for more expansive reasons: Unilever’s statement cites ‘divisiveness’ as well as hate speech.
