1) Facebook's reach is unique. If you want to share a message that's important to you with groups of people you care about reaching in the world, there's no better way to reach them at scale.
2) Facebook has had a number of negative sounding news cycles in the past few years (Cambridge Analytica, etc.), and data shows that the average American hasn't changed their behavior based on them. 70% of all Americans and Canadians use Facebook or Instagram at least once a month, and 55% of all Americans and Canadians use it at least once per day. Facebook's monthly and daily user counts have only grown, including this last quarter.
3) Very few advertisers ended up cutting spend during the boycott. Many who did so wanted to cut ad spend in a COVID environment anyway. For instance, Unilever and Coca-Cola also paused Twitter ads, which has nothing to do with the boycott.
4) I myself believe that, at least in comparison to other companies like Google, Facebook does try to police hate speech, and it's a hard job.
2) Daily users/monthly users is not really the stat worth tracking. That number was going to go up because of covid. I wonder about time spent on the site and time spent scrolling. That feels the important metric that has been dropping and tells a different story.
3) doesn't completely tell the story because if coke was cutting anyway that should show up
4) The differences on how each police hate speech doesn't really matter to anyone.
The real reason is 5: 5) Facebook raised prices for everyone else.
Facebook runs a VCG auction and is transparent around how payment works on their site, so there's not really any way for them to "raise prices" singlehandedly outside of this mechanism without being legally liable.
One, I remember a study back when cigarette companies were told they couldn't advertise on television that all major tobacco brands loved this because it meant they didn't have to spend any money on these types of ads. I'm sure there are versions of this all over the place in most marketing strategies.
Two, pardon my cynicism, but I'm sure companies model these things out and take action based on those models. No CEO is just like "yes, let's support a social cause." Randomly picking on a brand, but I'm sure Starbucks started flying a Pride Flag because it made sense to do so for the business.
It was a prisoners dilemma, where the whole industry could be more profitable by cutting advertising, but there was always an incentive to ‘defect’ and advertise your product.
The government banning the ads solved this problem for them.
Without a price change the government can’t benefit because the tax is proportional to the price.
So tobacco companies see a drop in costs, no change in revenue, which results in increased profits.
In the future the government could increase the tax rate, and try to force tobacco companies to drop prices to compensate, which could allow governments to extract the extra profits from reduced adverts. But that doesn’t strike me as the kind of behaviour governments participate in, a little too complicated and risky. Also very likely to have unforeseen consequences as it’s unlikely that every tobacco company was spending the same proportion of revenue on ads.
Not to say that tax rates didn’t go up. Just seems unlikely to be directly linked to the banning of ads. More likely they went up just because they can keep hiking the taxes until all the tobacco companies go bust.
(not making a statement about Tim Cook because I don’t know anything about his positions on gay rights)
Edit: Tim Cook has made numerous public statements in support of gay rights and being gay. My personal favorite: https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/24/tech/tim-cook-gay-apple/index...
https://www.cnn.com/2013/08/09/world/oprah-winfrey-racism-sw...
The bigger point is having money doesn’t stop discrimination.
Someone called the cops on Ving Rhames for sitting in his own house.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/actor-ving-rhames-said-...
*I get up, I open the door, there's a red dot pointed at my face from a 9 millimeter, 'Put up your hands.'"
Do they say to each other: "let's pretend we're doing this for a good cause and that it's not just to save money. Let's say this: ... to the public and our customers"
Or do they tend to keep pretending, also when talking with each other in private meetings?
In any case, this situation reminds me of the time when Google exited China and said they were leaving due to censorship concerns. The real reason for leaving was that Baidu had gained an overwhelming share of the search market. I think at the time of Google leaving China, they had less than 5% market share.
Being under attack (not just a verbal attack) by the government seems more of a concern. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Aurora
There had been a long string of problematic incidents before that which didn't come into the public though. Frustration and anger about China had been rising for years, and there was a very delicate power balance between Larry, Sergey and Eric going on in which Sergey didn't want to be there, Larry was sort of indifferent (if I recall correctly) and Eric very much wanted to be there. So it led to a lot of tension. When the huge hack happened, it ended up tipping things in Sergey's favour. Probably the lack of ability to make progress in China against Baidu, due almost exclusively due to the PRC's playing-field-tipping incidentally and not Baidu's skill, ended up stripping Eric of most of his intellectual ammo.
I have first-hand seen other channels soak up the FB funds during this time. It has been interesting to see the diversification into media that historically was not a major investment, because it under performed when compared to FB.
This whole thing would've been avoided if Mark grew a pair and permanently banned the first companies who did this from ever using FB services again. I really hope he bans media companies who are trying to extort FB right now, the antics would be dropped quickly.
Overall spending is bigger than blue chips? I feel like that's a citation needed. I've worked for companies spending 1 million+ on twitter advertising channel alone, so I'm curious how SMBs could get anywhere near close that level of spend in one channel per month forget about across multiple.
I've worked in advertising for 12+ years. I can easily imagine a company (say, Pepsi), deciding to pause a campaign they were planning to do because they figure the public are not in the mood to see advertising like that. And having nothing in the pipeline to replace it.
So a "boycott" to the public is really just "we don't have much to say right now" in private.
Also, "we need to save a few dollars because our quarterly profits have gone down."
I don't think it was ever any "moral" boycott. It was just an excuse to cut ad spending for a few weeks and avoid being tone deaf during a BLM protest movement.