Decision to pull ad not Hallmark’s finest moment

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 26/12/2019 (2117 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A few weeks ago, a tempest in a tinsel-filled teapot took place at the Hallmark Channel.

The U.S. organization One Million Moms (an arm of the conservative Christian American Family Association, which has been listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center for its stance against LGBTTQ+ people) convinced Hallmark to pull two TV advertisements for the wedding planning website Zola.

The ads featured two brides at the altar, who wondered whether their wedding would have been smoother if they’d used Zola. The women then share a brief kiss.

Hallmark initially agreed with One Million Moms — whose membership would seem to fall far short of that number: the organization has a bit more than 4,000 Twitter followers — that the subject matter contravened the channel’s “family-friendly” mission, and removed the offending ads from rotation. Zola then yanked its remaining ads in protest.

You might imagine an organization that puts the responsibility for raising upstanding young people solely in the hands of mothers would be delighted at the possibility of a more mom-heavy family unit.

However, One Million Moms’ unswerving dedication to hate disguised as concern has no room for logic.

Hallmark is a pretty tiny star in the cable firmament most of the year, but in December, the channel’s non-stop lineup of formulaic and resolutely heterosexual Christmas romance movies turns it into a U.S. ratings juggernaut. From Dec. 2 to 8, it was the No. 3 cable network in prime-time viewership, behind Fox News and ESPN (Hallmark’s programming airs on W in Canada).

So when the predictable backlash began, with celebrities expressing incredulity on social media and the hashtag #BoycottHallmarkChannel trending on Twitter, Hallmark was forced to acknowledge that its narrow definition of “family” was woefully outdated and reverse its decision.

This kind of “social media smackdown gets results” story might seem like par for the course these days, but it’s actually a good illustration of how the power of outrage has changed in the past decade.

Anyone who works in media can tell you complaints are far more common than compliments, and the squeaky wheel gets the grease. We tend to overemphasize negative feedback and respond to it as if it reflects the feelings of the general population.

However, these days it’s far more difficult for organizations such as One Million Moms to masquerade as the moral majority when it’s so easy to find out how fringe they truly are.

The list of campaigns on its website is both disheartening and hilarious: one hard-fought battle in the “win” column concerned removing a salacious TV ad for KitKat chocolate bars from the air. That’s right, an organization that unwaveringly supports a president who has boasted openly and in the most vulgar of terms about sexually violating women was concerned to the point of protest action about double entendres involving wafers.

The Moms claim Hallmark caved to the LGBTTQ+ community, to which the only response is “and about time.” In the past, this community would not have had a loud enough voice to overpower the shrill cries of indignation coming from fringe groups such as the Moms, nor the means to almost effortlessly mobilize a counterattack via the internet.

A state of high dudgeon is no longer sufficient to force conciliatory action from corporations. Nowadays, you also have to be on the right side of history.