Brands Responding to Facebook Boycott

According to newly surfaced information, all of Facebook’s corporate advertisers such as Microsoft, Samsung, Starbucks, and Wells Fargo, ended up cutting the most amount of their advertisement investments, after the month-long boycott over how the platform has been handling discrimination and hate speech.

Out of these corporations, Wells Fargo has reduced the least amount of their advertising spending, with an average daily cut of $111,200. The corporation was closely followed by Starbucks, which reduced its spending by approximately $111,500 per day.

The next corporation was Samsung, which ended up eliminating the average daily spend by $160,400, and finally comes Microsoft, that cut back the most in terms of its advertising spending, a sum of $166,000 which was previously used to be spent daily on ads in the United States during the second quarter. This corporation eliminated its Facebook advertisement, spending completely during the boycott.

Considering the fact that many of these corporations ended up announcing their plans to cut back on spending publicly, many analysts were not surprised by these actions.

This temporary boycott of the social media platform was organized by groups that included the Anti-Defamation League, Color of Change, as well as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

The goal of the temporary boycott was to put pressure on Facebook so that the platform could take more action to control all of the discrimination, hate speech, and violence that its users were spreading.

This campaign was also supported by several other big corporations, such as Levi Strauss, Verizon, and Unilever. Meanwhile, similarly big corporations, such as Disney, that never publicly announced they would be joining this boycotting campaign, reportedly also reduced their advertising budgets on the social media platform, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Additionally, aside from these big corporations, plenty of other small businesses participated in the boycott and halted their own ads for a mont

There were other corporations that ended up completely removing the Facebook advertising budget, like Microsoft. However, many of the top spenders ended up buying advertisements during July, though at much smaller levels.

Out of the top 500 advertisers on the social media platform, 90 corporations ended up participating in this campaign. The top 500 advertisers on Facebook from the second quarter, were responsible for an $80 million reduction in advertising spending during the first two weeks of July.

With all of these corporations cutting their spending for Facebook ads, other platforms and companies, such as Amazon, YouTube, and Twitter, ended up profiting more during the boycott, as corporations started to allocate more of their budgets towards them.

Finally, according to the CEO of the marketing agency Playbook Media, and former Facebook employee, Bryan Karas, the corporation has reached out to the agency as well as its advertisers to reiterate the progress along with the efforts that Facebook has been making in recent times to improve the detection of the discriminatory and hate speech that its users have been spreading.