The policy change that the campaign wants to achieve could be initiated because the Facebook image does not do any good if companies withdraw, says Willemijn van Dolen, professor of marketing at the University of Amsterdam. “It is yet another incident,” she says. Van Dolen points out that in 2018 Unilever also considered stopping advertising at Facebook, among others. “Apparently the time was not yet then and now it is.” She believes that Unilever is not alone in taking this step.
The organizers behind the campaign have already announced that they will ask European companies to join the movement. The next step is to call on the parties to withdraw from Facebook worldwide – and not just from America.
But the discussion is not yet going on among Dutch companies, says Bastiaan Weers, head of strategy at advertising agency N = 5. He says that stopping advertising is a way to get involved as a company in the social debate; something that companies are currently called to account for. And because many companies depend on Facebook, they take this opportunity to tap into the platform’s power, Weers thinks.
‘Real statement to join’
Not all companies that say they withdraw due to a flawed attitude to racism and hate speech will be 100 percent genuine, Weers thinks. But the parties that are doing it, such as Unilever, have always considered social awareness of paramount importance. “If you say as a company: ‘I am withdrawing’, you will also miss out on income. So it is really a statement to join this, with financial consequences. Then it goes further than just piggybacking on the movement. “
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