Censorious left targets Fox News and declares boycott of its advertisers

Radical activists seek to sink Fox News. With the excuse that it would be spreading fake news, leftist groups are calling for a boycott of advertisers so that they do not promote themselves on the conservative network. They claim to have done the same with Breitbart News, Steve Banon's site.

The standard bearer of this campaign is the organization Check My Ads, led by the fanatic Nandini Jammi. They present themselves as champions of truth, but what they really want is to impose censorship woke. It is the culture of cancellation taken to the advertising and marketing sector.

Sleeping Giants, the boycott platform created by Jammi

In addition to being an ultra-leftist, Nandini Jammi is a good connoisseur of the advertising world. On her website she defines herself as "marketing lead for tech startups in London and Berlin". Together with publicist Matt Rivitz, Jammi created a platform under the name Sleeping Giants. What started as a social media campaign ended up as a phenomenon awarded with a Cannes Gold Lion and a Webby Award in 2019.

The new inquisitors boast that many advertisers bought their message to stop running spots on Breitbart. The claws of this cancellation movement also reached other conservative or right-wing programs and media, such as The O'Reilly Factor, Tucker Carlson Tonight, The Ingraham Angle or Infowars. Sleeping Giants has a website where the reader can subscribe to their newsletter and purchase propaganda items: from face masks to baby T-shirts.

The new goal of ultra Jammi and her gang is to end advertising on Fox. Through letters to advertisers, they are pressuring them not to advertise on it. They say their brands are being promoted in a media that incites hatred, just as they did with Breitbart, which they claimed promoted violence.

Pressure on advertisers

In general, advertisers distribute their campaigns through media agencies. These agencies buy advertising space in different media, and they do so according to the audience of each one of them. The most demanded spaces are the most followed; and they are offered to different brands to design plural campaigns (covering different media).

In the case of the Internet it is similar, only that here it is practically automatic: the so-called programmatic advertising. Depending on the number of visits, ads are placed on the websites with the most clicks. So to speak: the more clicks, the more revenue. And that's where the leftist cancellers decided to step in. As Matt Rivitz acknowledged: "Media agencies hire space without any kind of rigor, regardless of the type of content that is placed on the sites". And, of course, that's wrong in his view because the public has to be shown what to see. It is understood that left-wing activists want to see woke messages. And no one should see anything else.

The doctrine of cancellation is permeating deeply, to the point of creating an entity to channel these actions. Check My Ads Institute is the new brand under which these activists operate. It defines itself as an "independent watchdog reshaping the ad tech industry". The key is how they are reshaping the industry and whether they are truly independent.