Their most vulnerable spot
by Tom Sullivan
Rick: And remember, this gun is pointed right at your heart.Aim instead for the pocketbook and score another for The Spocko Method. It drew an apology out of Laura Ingraham. That had to sting.
Captain Renault: That is my *least* vulnerable spot.
David Hogg Rejected By Four Colleges To Which He Applied and whines about it. (Dinged by UCLA with a 4.1 GPA...totally predictable given acceptance rates.) https://t.co/wflA4hWHXY
— Laura Ingraham (@IngrahamAngle) March 28, 2018
But David Hogg knows pundits like Ingraham are only fueled by insults and armored against them. He knows where they are most vulnerable. Hogg worked up a quick list for his 650k+ Twitter followers:
Pick a number 1-12 contact the company next to that #
— David Hogg (@davidhogg111) March 29, 2018
Top Laura Ingraham Advertisers
1. @sleepnumber
2. @ATT
3. Nutrish
4. @Allstate & @esurance
5. @Bayer
6. @RocketMortgage Mortgage
7. @LibertyMutual
8. @Arbys
9. @TripAdvisor
10. @Nestle
11. @hulu
12. @Wayfair
The Washington Post takes up the story there:
Within 24 hours, several companies responded — among them the pet food brand Nutrish and the home goods retailer Wayfair — announcing over Twitter and in media interviews that they would pull their ads from Ingraham’s show.Ingraham didn't apologize for targeting Hogg, mind you. Only for hurting his widdle feelings. Only because his followers hit a softer target than hers.
By Thursday afternoon, Ingraham apologized. “On reflection, in the spirit of Holy Week, I apologize for any upset or hurt my tweet caused him or any of the brave victims of Parkland,” she tweeted.
“As a company, we support open dialogue and debate on issues,” Jane Carpenter, Wayfair’s head of public relations, told CNBC. “However, the decision of an adult to personally criticize a high school student who has lost his classmates in an unspeakable tragedy is not consistent with our values.”A corporation's brand is one of its most vulnerable spots. Pointing out that who they sponsor can devalue the brand in which they've invested so much makes corporate PR people twitchy, as Spocko pointed out here:
3) This is about ALL of their stated values What does their mission statement say? What do their HR guidelines say? If they are a public company, do they have corporate governance documents?Regulation that they are legally required to follow? Vendor ethics agreements? Core brand value statements? They can then answer the question: "Are we true to our values? Is this what we want people to associate our brand with?" Then, if what they are sponsoring doesn't line up with their own stated values, they can decide to make a change.It's a shame Spocko doesn't get "a piece of the action" commensurate with his contribution, but it must be gratifying that people have taken up the Method from the Vulcan Stanislavski without even knowing its origins.