Apple vs. the Anti-Gay Ad Boycott: Immovable Object, Meet Irresistible Force
Apple (AAPL) -- inevitably, as it's the sine qua non of American brands -- has found itself the target of an attempt to dissuade it from advertising on the Christian Values Network due to the site's funding of anti-gay causes. Apple has yet to respond.
The advertiser boycott has become a potent tool for social activists, one that brand managers are struggling to come to terms with. The biggest recent example is News Corp.'s (NWS) shuttering of the News of the World tabloid after all its major advertisers balked at its phone-hacking practices. Fox News Channel's Glenn Beck was also forced to abandon his show due to an advertiser boycott.
Less spectacular examples include Johnson & Johnson (JNJ)'s withdrawal of an ad for Motrin that enraged moms; advertisers publicly expressing their disdain for FIFA boss Sepp Blatter; Groupon (GRPN) refusing to advertise on any of Donald Trump's media due to his Obama birth certificate campaign; and Hoover's removal of its ads from ABC in protest at the cancellation of All My Children and One Life to Live.
Apple is a more interesting case because of its historic disdain for what consumers think and CEO Steve Jobs' über alles stance when it comes to criticism of his business.
Barbarians at the electronic gates
The days when companies could ignore consumer boycott petitions are over, however. A decade or more ago, large corporations could shrug off church groups and hippies, even if they piled hundreds of thousands of signatures on physical sheets of paper on the front steps of the HQ building. Within a few news cycles, the controversy would go away.
But Twitter, Facebook and the blogosphere can make a single complaint go viral globally in hours. Currently -- on the evening of July 12, 2011 -- it's impossible to tell whether the Change.org petition to get Apple to remove its online store from CVN will fizzle or balloon into the next "Pepsi suicide" fiasco.
The petition notes that CVN users can choose to donate 2 percent of the value of their purchases to Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council. Apple is one of dozens of brands whose online stores are featured on the site. FOTF -- whose supporters include Michael Lohan (yes, that Lohan) and Stephen Baldwin (yes, that Baldwin) -- sees homosexuality as "a particularly evil lie of Satan." (It also dislikes America's Next Top Model because "A man -â€" dressed and made up to look like a woman -- competed against real women" in one of the shows.)
FOTF and FRC are just two of 170,000 charities that CVN users can choose to donate to. It seems like a thin connection to suggest that Apple is directly funding attacks on gays, but Microsoft (MSFT) and TOMS Shoes have agreed to remove themselves from CVN, giving precedent to the notion that Apple could follow suit.
Related: