Media Girl on the Gilliard ad kerfuffle
Ads on blogs, ads not on blogs … and bloggers blogging about it
Advertisers pull ads from publications and broadcasts all the time, for all sorts of reasons, and I really don’t think the blogger is well served by fretting publicly about it. That’s life in the media big leagues.
By way of background, Media Girl refers to the events following from blogger Steve Gilliard’s depiction of African-American Republican Maryland gubernatorial candidate Michael Steele in minstrel black-face. It provoked a lot of outrage and, unsurprisingly, Tim Kaine, the Democrat in the race, pulled his advertising from Gilliard’s blog.
Equally predictably, Gilliard and Kos went totally bat guano, shrieking about cowardice and racism. Kos:
Still, here’s the bottom line — campaigns should advertise on blogs to reach readers, not to “endorse” the publication. We’re bloggers. We’ll say things that are “controversial”. If campaigns don’t think they can weather such storms, then by all means they should NOT advertise on blogs.
Because every time a campaign freaks out at a blogger and pulls their ads, we’re going to raise a stink about it and inevitably make that campaign look bad. So they should think long and hard before putting money into a Blogad campaign.
But, as Media Girl (a good Leftie) points out, Kos has it exactly backwards. Advertisers (politicans or cold cereal makers) will only pay for ads when it will help their campaigns; when it’s counter-productive, they won’t. Kos’ notion that political advertisers should stay with a blog outlet, once they have made a media buy, and not pull it if it becomes a liability is childish.
Kos and Gilliard are being whiny, petulant, and immature. I shouldn’t be surprised, eh? Any blogger who sells ads should remember that the free market is all about willing buyers and willing sellers. As soon as one party (in this case, the buyer) is no longer willing, he will stop buying.
As Media Girl says: “That’s life in the media big leagues.”
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