VF Corp's The North Face, REI, and Upwork say they are committing to an ad boycott of Facebook in light of its handling of misinformation and hate speech
(CNN Business)Outdoor apparel brand The North Face has become the best-known company yet to commit to an advertising boycott of Facebook …
CNNBrian Fung
Context & Ripple Effects
The North Face, REI, and Upwork are the latest names to join what began as a niche protest and is hardening into a coordinated July-long suspension of Facebook advertising over misinformation and hate speech — within days they were followed by Patagonia, Ben & Jerry's, Eddie Bauer, and Magnolia Pictures in an expanding coalition of outdoor, food, and entertainment brands.
The boycott's economic weight, though, was always in question: among Facebook's top 25 advertisers from 2019 — Uber and Netflix included — only Microsoft, Starbucks, and Pfizer had signed on as of early July, and Politico argued brands had little to lose joining during a pandemic-slowed ad month. By August 1, The North Face and Heineken were back, while SAP and Smucker held out.
First-order effects
The North Face, REI, and Upwork immediately shift their July ad budgets away from Facebook, converting a content-moderation grievance into direct revenue pressure timed to a seasonally weak ad month.
Facebook faces its first organized brand exodus rather than individual complaints, forcing it to answer for amplification of hate speech to customers who spend there year-round.
Second-order effects
The coalition effect pulls in mid-size lifestyle brands — Patagonia, Ben & Jerry's, Eddie Bauer — whose shared customer base makes participation cheap reputationally, widening the boycott faster than any single company could have.
Because only three of the top 25 advertisers joined, Facebook's core revenue stays largely untouched, which lets the company absorb the protest without changing its moderation posture materially.
Third-order effects
The August split — The North Face and Heineken resuming while Levi Strauss, SAP, and Smucker continue — establishes the template for advertiser activism: a symbolic one-month pause most brands can afford, followed by a small committed rump whose leverage depends on whether big spenders ever join.
If future boycotts keep drawing from the same outdoor/consumer-brand cohort while top advertisers sit out, platform governance disputes will be priced as routine marketing risk rather than structural threats to social-media ad economics.
The trend: Brand-led ad boycotts of social platforms are becoming a recurring, calendar-bound pressure tactic that generates headlines but rarely moves the largest advertisers or the platforms' bottom lines.
North Face says it will discontinue ads on Faceboook, after civil rights groups call on brands to stop paying for ads on the social network. https://twitter.com/...
i am reluctant to ever compliment a brand since a lot of what we're seeing lately is just marketing with a woke veneer on top, but i've also been laughed out of rooms for suggesting pulling funding from facebook. this couldn't have been easy. https://twitter.com/...
Good! Now what company is pulling ads next? Facebook has decimated online media sites, crippled small outlets from making money & cost countless freelancers their jobs. Why is everyone collectively keeping them in the business of destroying businesses? https://twitter.com/...
This is the path Zuckerberg, Sandberg, and company have selected. They didn't have to become the Fox News of social networks. They chose to. https://twitter.com/...
Facebook operates under idea that they can & should give in to every bad-faith demand from the far-right, because the far-right will punish them for not doing so AND the mainstream & left will just accept this asymmetric pandering. Math is changing with announcements like this. h…
Thank you @TheNorthFace for joining @ADL @NAACP @ColorofChange and our other partners to support racial justice on #Juneteenth by taking a stand against hate and pushing for better practices on the largest social media platform in the world. #StopHateForProfit https://twitter.com…
Thank you @thenorthface for understanding the responsibility social media sites share in the spread of accurate information across their platforms. https://twitter.com/...