Kellogg’s pulls advertising from Breitbart News amidst campaign shaming brands for supporting far-right title
Kellogg’s is pulling its ads from Breitbart News, the right-wing news site whose former chairman Steve Bannon has been appointed as a top adviser to president-elect Donald Trump.
Kellogg's was one of the brands named in the campaign calling on brands to cease advertising on Breitbart News
The decision to withdraw advertising from the site comes in response to mounting pressure from activists calling on marketers to abandon Breitbart News because of its controversial editorial content which has widely been accused of spouting racist and anti-Semiti views.
Activists have been gathering screenshots of online ads at Breitbart News and using them as leverage to pressure companies into pulling them.
Kellogg’s found itself under fire after a screen shot showed an ad for Kellogg’s Frosted Mini Wheats appearing on the site.
"We regularly work with our media-buying partners to ensure our ads do not appear on sites that aren't aligned with our values as a company," said Kris Charles, a spokeswoman for Kellogg.
Charles added: "We recently reviewed the list of sites where our ads can be placed and decided to discontinue advertising on Breitbart.com. We are working to remove our ads from that site."
According to data from ComScore, Breitbart News had 19 million unique monthly visitors in October, up from 12.9 million a year ago.
Despite the growing traffic on the site, AppNexus, one of the biggest digital advertising services, barred Breitbart from using its advertising tools earlier this month after ruling that the site violated its hate speech regulations.
AppNexus carried out a ‘human audit’ on the website and found that it broke the rule repeatedly by using coded or covert language.
Some brands have stated that they will continue to advertise on Breitbart though, including Nissan. Another screenshot from the campaign showed one of the automaker’s ad on the site and the company responded saying that it "places ads in a variety of sites in order to reach as many consumers as possible”.
The statement continued: "The placement of Nissan advertising is not intended to be a political commentary and there are no plans to change the advertising mix at this time."
Breitbart has been widely criticized for incendiary articles, such as one that warns of "Muslim invaders" and another that dubs conservative thinker Bill Kristol a "Renegade Jew."