UBC’s Athletics department has pulled an advertising campaign for the new aquatic centre from the conservative news website Breitbart.
The decision came after Emma Pullman, a campaign strategist at SumOfUs — a group that aims to stop “big corporations from behaving badly” — tweeted UBC Thursday morning.
The school took the ad down less than 4o minutes later.
“We’re always following social media,” said Susan Danard, UBC’s managing director of public affairs.
@emmacaroline_ We've adjusted this campaign — our ads should no longer appear on this site.
— UBC (@UBC) January 26, 2017
She said placing ads on Breitbart wasn’t a conscious choice by UBC Athletics but a mistake on the part of Glacier Media, the ad agency that handles the department's advertising.
“Normally what we always do is say please, whatever you do, don't post on inappropriate sites, but I guess in this case the ad agency accidentally didn't exclude this one,” she said.
Danard clarified that UBC Public Affairs didn’t direct Athletics to take the ad down, and that the department is in charge of its own advertising policy — but once Athletics found out that Breitbart was hosting their ad they wasted no time in pulling it.
“They [Atheltics] were kind of sheepish and quick to understand and appreciate that it shouldn't have happened,” said Danard. “Any site that's really extreme politically or potentially offensive to somebody, it wouldn't make good advertising sense. You’re not going to be helping your cause by doing that.”
Pullman has since urged McGill and other universities to pull their ads from the site.
@SumOfUs @slpng_giants We've adjusted our advertising campaign — our ads should no longer appear on Breitbart site.
— McGill University (@McGillU) January 27, 2017
“It is not surprising that Canada’s colleges and universities do not want to be associated with Breitbart’s promotion of white supremacy and hate. Simply put — Breitbart’s bigoted, racist, sexist and often violent political rhetoric is bad for business,” said Pullman in a written statement.
Danard agreed that Breitbart wasn't somewhere the university wanted to be advertising.
“We have an established practice on campus of being respectful and tolerant. It doesn’t make any good business sense, and it doesn't make any advertising sense and it just doesn’t meet the objective of making people happy and want to come and use the pool,” she said.
“We haven’t had a relationship with these guys and we don’t want to have one.”
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