“What kind of advertising idiot did Lowes hire? “
I am going to venture a guess and say Lowe’s uses an agency to buy air time and schedule their TV advertising.
It is quite possible they didn’t even know they were advertising during that show until it was brought to their attention.
They pulled the ads. That’s good enough for me.
An agency, I’ll agree, but Lowe’s needs to have someone in
an oversight position. If they advertise on Al Jazeera’s
“Rebuilding AlQaeda” show and pull the ads afterwards, is that “good enough”? Not for me.
I can factually state you're correct. I used to work for Leo Burnett in Chicago. One of our lines of business (which has since been spun off and become StarCom MediaVest) was selling advertising BLOCKS of time. Those blocks of time were allocated to any number of networks and time slots, not necessarily to individual shows.
Often times, our clients would come to us and state they wnated to reach a demographic target, which advertising block packages are designed to do. The majority of time, our clients never asked which specific shows their advertising would be seen on. They would occasionally ask which networks.
As boycotts became more popular, clients would occasionally come back to us and ask us to pull advertising from specific networks, which we could do. Once in a blue moon, they'd come back and ask to pull advertising from a specific show. Our first case of that was Beavis and Butthead on MTV which caused us to re-write significant portions of our media buying and optimization routines to allow for clients to specify any shows they did not want to advertise on.