CASE STUDY OF A COMMERCIAL KILLED BY COMPLAINTS

CASE STUDY OF A COMMERCIAL KILLED BY COMPLAINTS

A syndicated Ann Landers column (June 13, 1988) told of a test market commercial that was dropped due to calls and letters to the company. The

ad opened with two teenage boys on a cliff overlooking the ocean. One challenges the other to a game, whereby both drive their cars toward the cliff and the one who jumps out first is a chicken. The boys start their race. The boy who made the dare at some point jumps out of his car. The other boy looks nervous and is shown panicking and pushing against the car door which is stuck We hear him screaming as his car goes over the

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cliff and crashes onto the rocks below, as the first boy watches in horror. Finally, the camera cuts to the ocean with a denim jacket and a pair of jeans floating on the water with a caption on a black screen: Union Bay—Fashion that Lasts.

The company’s marketing director told Ann Landers that the ad was chosen for its impact and its dramatic quality. The director further said she believed that teens did not take ads very literally and would think that it was funny. However, after several complaints by phone and letter, the company withdrew the ad.

An excellent first outlet for media concerns is the editorial page of a local newspaper. Most are delighted to print letters to the editor or even guest columns. To find out about some larger media organizations and governmental and consumer agencies, search the Internet for web sites, which provide addresses, phone numbers, and e-mail addresses where agencies may be contacted.

Group Efforts

Individuals working together can often have more impact than isolated individuals. One corporate method is the boycott, whereby people refrain from buying some product or using some publication or station until changes are made. Even the threat of a boycott sends chills up the spines of advertisers, publications, or radio or TV stations. Newspapers have gone out of business when certain key economic interests have pulled their advertising. Convenience stores have stopped selling sex magazines in response to public complaints and the threat of a boycott. Nestle’s changed its infant formula marketing campaign in response to public outcry and a boycott. Fear of adverse and organized public reaction is a major reason that U.S. television stations are so slow to accept condom ads, even in the age of the AIDS scare, when a majority of public opinion favors such ads.

In occasional cases a group may file legal action against a media organization. For example, when the FCC periodically reviews applications of radio and television stations for renewal, opportunity is available to challenge such renewal. Although the actual failure to renew a broadcasting license is extremely rare in the United States, such pressure may have substantial effects on subsequent station policy. For example, civil rights groups in the 1960s used this approach to force broadcasters to become more responsive to African American concerns in their communities. Sometimes the mere threat of legal or legislative action is enough to produce the desired change. For example, consumer groups like the nowdefunct Action for Children’s Television (ACT) have put pressure on the broadcast industry’s

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National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) to limit the allowable number of minutes of commercials per hour on children’s television. Their appeals to the FCC to regulate such numbers have led to the NAB limiting commercial time itself, a move it apparently considered preferable to government- mandated regulation.

Certain organizations have established themselves as watchdogs on certain kinds of issues. For example, the national Parent Teacher Association (PTA) has at different times monitored children’s advertising and violent and sexual content on television. Resulting public awareness, as well as the latent threat of a boycott, has probably had some subtle effects. Many local citizens’ groups protesting pornography have pressured convenience stores to stop selling sex magazines or put pressure on sponsors of very violent or sexual television programs. For example, a boycott of Pepsi in 1989 led to the company’s cancellation of its sponsorship of a Madonna video and tour.

Sometimes follow-up monitoring is necessary, recognizing that unwanted regulation may sometimes be creatively circumvented. For example, the Children’s Television Act of 1990 required TV stations to increase the number of hours of educational programming to children. In response to this, some stations redefined existing cartoons and syndicated sitcom reruns as educational. For example, in its license-renewal application, one station described G.I.Joe as “presenting a fight against an evil that has the capabilities of mass destruction of society” (School of Hard Knocks, 1992, p. 32). Truly educational shows like news shows for children ran at 5:30 in the morning, whereas newly defined “educational” programs like The Jetsons and Leave It to Beaver reruns retained the better time slots. By 1997, public dissatisfaction with such ruses pressured the FCC to clarify the 1990 law with an exact number of hours and clearer specification of what programming was considered educational (Steyer, 2002). However, after 2001 the pendulum again swung back in the free market, laissez faire direction.

Sometimes social science research itself may have an important impact on policy making. For example, the laboratory research finding that people could not perceive or be affected by backward audio messages (Box 4.7) led several states to withdraw pending legislation requiring record companies to put warning labels on album jackets (Vokey & Read, 1985). Research played

a role in developing, and later modifying, the set of aged-based content ratings first used for TV programs in the United States in 1997 (Cantor, 1998a). The recent research on sexual violence (discussed in chapter 10) has tremendous potential impact on legal, policy, film-making, and even lifestyle issues. For a careful discussion of how research on sexual violence may be used to effect legal and policy change, see Penrod and Linz (1984) and Linz, Turner, Hesse, and Penrod (1984).

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Before such research can have much impact on public opinion or public policy, however, the findings from that research must somehow be commu- nicated to the world beyond the scientific community. This act in itself can often affect the perceived reality about that issue in the mind of the public.