Posted on 08/03/2012 3:38:07 PM PDT by markomalley
During the height of the Rush Limbaugh/Sandra Fluke controversy in March, software company Carbonite announced it would no longer sponsor the conservative radio host. As CEO David Friend said at the time:
No one with daughters the age of Sandra Fluke, and I have two, could possibly abide the insult and abuse heaped upon this courageous and well-intentioned young lady. Mr. Limbaugh, with his highly personal attacks on Miss Fluke, overstepped any reasonable bounds of decency. Even though Mr. Limbaugh has now issued an apology, we have nonetheless decided to withdraw our advertising from his show. We hope that our action, along with the other advertisers who have already withdrawn their ads, will ultimately contribute to a more civilized public discourse.
Liberals touted the action as proof that Limbaugh was becoming toxic and his show was in danger. So how has dumping Limbaugh worked out for Carbonite? Not so well. Turns out alienating Rushs fans may have been more damaging than alienating his critics. As the blog Legal Insurrection noted today:
On August 1 Carbonite released its 2d Quarter 2012 results, the first full quarter after dropping Limbaugh in March. The results shocked Wall Street, as Carbonite did not meet its growth targets, causing multiple analysts to drop the target price. The stock dropped 15% in a day.
Whats more, in a conference call, Friend linked the decline to the Limbaugh action:
Yeah, Id say it turned out to be a bigger issue than we had anticipated. Because you know at the time there was a lot of noise, I mean we had a huge spike in web traffic around that time just because of all the interest in the whole subject. And it took close to a month for that to sort of die down. And meanwhile our metrics were, we really couldnt see what was going because there was so much noise around the website that we had no idea what the ultimate impact was going to be. It turned out to be a bigger hole in our revenue than we had thought when we initially did this.
Friend added that he was not regretful of the decision. I think things would have been worse had we not done that. Legal Insurrections William Jacobson calls that laughable adding: Its too convenient now to say things would have been worse, when Friend completely misjudged the impact of dropping Limbaugh.
Poetic justice.
Carbonite is certainly not the kind of product whose marketing campaign should be centered on pleasing liberals. Liberals are either too rich to value what’s on their computer enough to protect it or they’re too poor to ever buy something so unnecessary. This is a product for the middle class, hence ticking off conservatives is a bad idea.
Shows the danger of flying off the handle and getting caught up in the heat of an issue because the MSM wants to push it. Had the CEO simply said, if asked, that he wasn’t responsible for what someone on a radio show on which he advertises says, and left it at that, he probably would have been fine.
I’m in the same boat as you. I’m in the middle of a subscription period with carbonite, but when it is over- I’m gone. Additionally, I have owned at least one GM vehicle since 1983. Currently, I have two GM vehicles. But I will never again buy a GM vehicle.
How fast was he spinning when he said that?
Didn't see the video, but I suspect that the spin velocity was somewhere around Warp Factor 9...
the infowarrior
It was Political Correctness ‘what’ stole the day not the word Rush used. Think about it.
I know that’s shopped, but it sure puts a different spin on a ‘rubber room’....
“WLets not forget that this young, courageous woman brought the slut description upon herself”
I can’t believe Mr. Limbaugh apologized for that.
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