Vanity Metrics 23
The Stop Hate Scorecard
Photo by Clay Banks
Now that’s it’s August, the official #StopHateForProfit campaign has ended. While the original ask was for brands to stop all ad spend across Facebook’s network for the month of July, public pressure has grown on spenders around the world to keep it up until the company commits to substantive changes.
Now that it’s August, it’s time to see how they did. Who made it through July? Who couldn’t wait to turn the ad tap back on? Was Zuckerberg right when he proclaimed, “all these advertisers will be back on the platform soon enough”?
“Dear Mark”, released by #StopHateForProfit July 23, 2020
What started as a shower musing (I wonder how many of those brands that bigged themselves up actually followed through?), quickly bloomed into an entire day of research. Using the official list of companies that formally committed to pausing ads, I dove into the ad library to see how well they did. With over 1000 brands on board, I’ve whittled that down to just under 70 names you should know. Want to see how any particular brand performed? You can search to see their ad history right here.
A couple of notes worth noting:
There’s little correlation between a brand’s public image and its actions. Some brands you may think of as “progressive” couldn’t wait to get back in the ad game. One still had a “Black Lives Matter” banner up while running ads.
There’s not a strong correlation, but consumer products seem to be the ones that were most eager to get back to advertising, mainly on Instagram.
Many brands reactivated their ad accounts outside of North America and the EU first. Whether that’s on purpose to avoid bad press, I know not.
Brands use a combination of ad buys between their global accounts and accounts dedicated to specific areas/countries. It makes it really hard to sift through to see if they actually not spending, or playing a digital shell game to keep pushing ads with smaller accounts. And I didn’t get paid for this, so I’m not about to make it my life’s work.
Ads that were scheduled at the end of June may have been paused for July, but there’s no way to tell.
This scorecard is in no way a scientific study. This was done using publically available information and what Facebook discloses as part of it’s Ad Transparency policy and the Facebook Ad Library.
Anyways, here’s the list. It’s locked to viewable only, but the link is shareable, so feel free to do so. If you need more access, feel free to email me ryan@hscreates.ca
Ryan LaFlamme has worked in social media marketing and advertising for longer than the job had a title. He formed the independent social consultancy Hub and Spoke in 2016, and can be found hanging out on Twitter @ryanlaf Now accepting new clients and speaking engagements.