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Originally Posted by Crapshoot
Im curious Jon- dont you work in Radio Ads ? If so, at what point does stuff like this actually happen ? Have you pulled stuff because you've been offended ?
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The point where ads get pulled are going to vary by client & situation. I know, I've just proven I have a firm grasp of the obvious here, but that's really what it'll boil down to.
I think this particular case illustrates a pretty strong rule though -- say something really offensive & you've got a chance of getting away with it, but say it AND get bad press in the process, well, that's a lot harder to get by without someone paying attention.
In my particular case, the high-profile events of the past couple of years caused us to have several conversations with both of our main clients, trying to get a good understanding of what lines they didn't want crossed in the first place. That's really step one on my side of the business AFAIC, know your client well enough to know what will upset them, and if you don't know, ask them. My personal breaking point was having a ten day stretch where 2 stations (different markets) we were running on managed to capture 3 sets of headlines in their local market daily paper. Again, bad press = backlash & you never know whether that backlash will extend to advertisers. As luck would have it, our flights were ending just as the mini-shitstorms broke, so I didn't have to pull anything in the middle of the flight.
As it stands right now, there are several syndicated shows that have earned themselves an outright ban from anything we do -- Stern, Mancow, Bubba the Love Sponge, Bob & Tom (who may finally get themselves off the list if they stay clean for another 3-6 months or so), and Lex & Terry (the foulest thing I've ever heard on radio without uttering a curse -- those misogynistic pricks are disgusting). Beyond that handful, every station/show is evaluated on a case-by-case basis.
Being an old radio guy, there's a lot of things I do differently than most agency side people, one of them being keeping close tabs on pretty much every market & every station I buy (it's not unusual for me to know about format or personnel changes at a station before their own sales reps know). Station websites are a quick window into the attitude & approach of a station & in formats where concerns are highest (most rock formats, some talk, some CHR's),I actually take a look at every station being considered for a buy. I've bounced quite a few stations from consideration based on their web content -- if you've got hardcore porn links on the main page, I think it's a pretty reasonable assumption that you're going to have some questionable content on air. Another thing I do though is try to isolate the problems I find -- if you're running Stern in the morning but check out fine in the other dayparts, then I give those slots normal consideration.
And, opinionated heart-on-sleeve bastard I may be, I can honestly say that I've only ever bounced one daypart on one station from due consideration because of my
personal reaction to their content. It was something said that crossed a personal line with me & I really don't know if I could ever have put money there again without a serious crisis of conscience. I made both the client & the station aware of the situation, both accepted my reaction & my reasoning and we moved along from that point. Almost certainly coincidentally, that jock was fired a couple of months later, solving the problem for me.
Oddly enough, I've only had to pull spots off the air one time in over five years -- in the aftermath of 9/11. As bad luck would have it, we had inherited some previously recorded (i.e. before we were involved w/the client) spots that featured a sort-of "combat/military" theme. I had those off the air in every market by noon on 9/12, and in all but two markets by mid-afternoon on 9/11 -- those two markets had telephone outages during the day of the attacks & I couldn't reach my reps with the stop orders.
I know that probably seems like a really odd thing to be worrying about that day, but it was pure instinct or something that took over. My first ad agency environment included a number of people with experience in "disaster scenarios" -- both airline industry experience (where a crash by any commercial airline activates a stop-ads procedure for every airline) and one of the co-owners had once worked on the Kool-Aid account ... at the time of the Jim Jones/Guyana mass suicides. Needless to say, she'd BTDT when it came to getting spots off the air in a hurry. Things I learned from them just kicked in I guess.