Viacom, the owner of a number of media outlets like CBS and MTV, says it is just following company policy. But Wes Boyd, president of MoveOn.org says the media giant is playing fast and loose with the right to free speech. “Viacom won’t place our ads,” says Boyd.
MoveOn.org, the group that put up the money for the campaign, first gained public attention after running the controversial “daisy” television spot riffing on an ad from Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1964 presidential campaign that juxtaposed a little girl pulling petals from a flower against the backdrop of a nuclear explosion. Yesterday morning, the organization–which describes itself as a grass-roots advocacy group–solicited donations over an e-mail list to raise $75,000 to plaster its latest message against war in Iraq on the sides of buses, buildings and billboards in four major American markets.
According to Boyd, the donations came rolling in–after just two hours the group had met its goal. About 75 percent of that money was slated for buses in Washington and billboards in Los Angeles and Detroit, markets where Viacom Outdoor–a division of Viacom Inc. and the largest outdoor-advertising entity in North America–controls a significant share of the outdoor-advertising space. And Boyd says that unlike the “daisy” TV spot, this was meant to be “a clean political message.” (The “daisy” ad ran into trouble but on a lesser scale. Only four television stations nixed the ad; three in L.A. and one in Washington.)
But yesterday afternoon, MoveOn.org received word from Metromark International, an advertising and media brokerage firm that was hired to buy ad space for the group, saying that Viacom refused to put up the ads.
The rejection came as a surprise to Lou Manso, the Metromark buyer handling the sale. He says the regional Viacom representatives in Los Angeles hadn’t given any indication that there was going to be a problem. The art for the billboard was submitted on Monday, and there was no indication that it would be rejected, he said. But on Wednesday, a regional Viacom representative told Manso that Wally Kelly, CEO of Viacom Outdoor, had personally decided not to run the ads. Manso received an e-mail that said: “Our main office has decided to decline this business.” Manso says he was not given any reasons for the decision, except that it was Viacom’s space and they could do what they wanted with it. “I’m very disappointed,” says Manso. “I didn’t feel that this campaign was offensive or in poor taste. You have [the decision of] one person in Phoenix, and it affects all the markets in the U.S.”
Viacom, however, says it had legitimate reasons to decline the advertisements. “The issue was not the content of the ad, but the guidelines for taking ads from organizations of this type,” a Viacom spokesperson told NEWSWEEK. “They didn’t meet the guidelines.” According to the spokesperson, those guidelines are: to pay upfront; to give a 30-day advance notice of the ad, and to display contact information on the billboard. A Viacom official said the organization did not comply with the first two. The official also said the company is more cautious with political ads and dot-com organizations. But Manso says that Viacom is “backpedaling” because they’ve been embarrassed. “At no time were we presented with guidelines,” he says, noting that he dealt with sales reps in four cities. “And that’s just not the way business is done.”
Of course, this isn’t the first time antiwar groups have said that they have had problems getting their message out. TrueMajority, a celebrity-studded activist group says that the two antiwar ads that they wanted to run from Jan. 27 to Feb. 3 were refused by CNN, Fox, Comedy Central and four New York affiliates. One of the ads showcased Susan Sarandon alongside Edgar Peck, the former U.S. ambassador to Iraq; the other costars Janeane Garofalo and Bishop Melvin G. Talbert of the United Methodist Church. “It does not sound like free speech is alive and well in this country,” says Ben Cohen, founder of TrueMajority and cofounder of the Ben & Jerry ice-cream company. “We can’t even get our message out by paying for advertising.”
The latest ad spat comes as antiwar activists are gearing up for an international day of protest in cities ranging from London to Jakarta to Sao Paulo on Saturday. In New York, where a federal judge refused to issue demonstrators a permit to march in front of the United Nations, a new venue has been planned. MoveOn.org also intends to regroup to keep the ad campaign alive. So far, says Boyd, 5,480 people had signed on for a total of $212,515 in donations to run the billboards. The big question now is where they will put them.
