Google doodle

[Umbran]

And that said, ratings are a little more nuanced than you're presenting. Shows typically decline over time and a fair number of lost viewers may simply be due to that. Presenting the 28% loss as you did implies that this is all due to the flap caused by dood's comments. That's ... specious.

I don't think it is specious at all, for this context. Yes, shows do lose viewers over time, and not all of that loss will be due to the controversy. But however they lost it, they did lose it. For a popular show, typical ratings loss is more like 10%, as I understand. A drop of over a quarter is serious trouble.

The public media noise around the controversy is just smoke. What tells, in the end, is the viewership. If there were really solid backing for the star and his ideas, viewership should have been up (or at least flat), not way down, for that season premier. Some noisy people made a stink, but that did not translate into supportive results or action in the long run.

So, if we are to use that controversy as an indicator - while some noisy people may make a stink about the Google doodle, or the Coke or Cheerios ad, that noise will not correlate to action. Apparently, the risk for taking such a stand is not large*. Heck, the Superbowl Cheerios ad was the second of its kind - some people made a stink about the first. If the business found that it ultimately hurt them, do you really think they'd have so deliberately thumbed their nose at those people a second time? No!


*As Tom Lehrer satirically noted, "It takes a certain amount of courage to get up in a coffee-house or a college auditorium and come out in favor of the things that everybody else in the audience is against - like peace and justice and brotherhood and so on."

 

[Zombie_Babies]

I don't think it is specious at all, for this context. Yes, shows do lose viewers over time, and not all of that loss will be due to the controversy. But however they lost it, they did lose it. For a popular show, typical ratings loss is more like 10%, as I understand. A drop of over a quarter is serious trouble.

The public media noise around the controversy is just smoke. What tells, in the end, is the viewership. If there were really solid backing for the star and his ideas, viewership should have been up (or at least flat), not way down, for that season premier. Some noisy people made a stink, but that did not translate into supportive results or action in the long run.

So, if we are to use that controversy as an indicator - while some noisy people may make a stink about the Google doodle, or the Coke or Cheerios ad, that noise will not correlate to action. Apparently, the risk for taking such a stand is not large*. Heck, the Superbowl Cheerios ad was the second of its kind - some people made a stink about the first. If the business found that it ultimately hurt them, do you really think they'd have so deliberately thumbed their nose at those people a second time? No!


*As Tom Lehrer satirically noted, "It takes a certain amount of courage to get up in a coffee-house or a college auditorium and come out in favor of the things that everybody else in the audience is against - like peace and justice and brotherhood and so on."

I explained why I thought it was specious.

At any rate, they did lose viewers. However, as stated before, they didn't lose nearly as many as they would have had they canned the show. My entire point here is that what some are presenting as a 'safe' or 'positive' statement isn't necessarily so. It by all means should be but there is obviously a significant number of folks who see it as a negative.

As for DD, the initial public outcry was against the show and A&E responded - quickly - in tune with that noise. After they did, louder noise popped up demanding they reinstate the man who made the comments. In this case, noise from both sides of the issue actually spawned action.

 

[billd91]

My cynical thought is that I would not expect a large company to weigh in on such matters until the writing was on the wall. I'm pretty sure Coke and Cherrios knew darned well their superbowl ads would generate more supporters than detractors.

So, while they help sway public opinion, that's mostly on the back side of the curve.

I'm not so sure of that. Take a look at the gay rights issue. Gay marriage rights are polling well and state bans are falling - but the deck is still stacked against same sex marriages in more than half the states and in a lot of countries across the globe the issue is getting worse for homosexuals (just check current moves in some African states and, of course, Russia). By putting a same sex couple in the Coke ad, by putting the rainbow on the Google Doodle, these corporations may be acting when the issue is reaching a major decisive point when just a few years ago everything was tacking the opposite direction and bans were nearly unstoppable.

And that's without even getting into the issues the US still has with racism and the recent setbacks that have been thrown at minority voting participation. It may be 50 years too late for Coke to be at the vanguard, but they're involved against racism right when a series of setbacks are being pushed pretty hard. So I'll give them some credit for taking a stand and portraying mixed race marriage and kids as a perfectly normal part of the American experience.

 

[Zombie_Babies]

And really, the only way to get this stuff more widely accepted is to stop treating it as something rare or odd and to expose more people to it. I applaud the companies that do that but still have to wonder if it's really their place.