On Tuesday, Kellogg Co. announced that it was pulling its ads from the site, effectively distancing itself from Breitbart News Network’s controversial articles.
The website, founded by conservative commentator Andrew Breitbart, has been linked to the alt-right movement and has been accused of spreading hate speech.
Several activists have started targeting companies whose products are advertised on Breitbart News. The site’s former leader, Stephen Bannon, will serve as president-elect Donald Trump’s senior policy adviser.
Kellogg’s vice president of global communications, Kris Charles, said in a statement that Breitbart News’ content is not “aligned with [the company’s] values”:
We regularly work with our media buying partners to ensure our ads do not appear on sites that aren't aligned with our values as a company. This involves reviewing websites where ads could potentially be placed using filtering technology to assess site content. As you can imagine, there is a very large volume of websites, so occasionally something is inadvertently missed. In this case, we learned from consumers that ads were placed on Breitbart.com and decided to discontinue advertising there.
Kellogg joins Warby Parker, Novo Nordisk and the San Diego Zoo in pulling advertising from Breitbart News. At least one digital ad service, AppNexus, said it will not allow Breitbart to use its tool because the site’s rhetoric violates its rules about hate speech.
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While the hard-right news and commentary site isn’t peddling porn, gambling or other types of content that would make typical advertising buyers cringe, it is one of the most widely read publishers of misogynist, anti-Semitic, anti-LGBT, fat-shaming and other hateful content.
Despite a retreat by some companies who have moved to get their brands off of the website, others, including German automaker BMW, Chipotle Mexican Grill, Dell computers and Chase bank continue to help bring revenue to the site as of Tuesday. Part of the problem is that many companies aren’t policing where their automatically delivered ads are appearing.
Other brand managers willingly run risk of backlash in order to reach Breitbart News’ 19.2 million monthly visitors.
Not all brands are shying away from advertising on Breitbart, though. After a screenshot showed a Nissan ad on the website, the automaker said in a statement that it “places ads in a variety of sites in order to reach as many consumers as possible.”
“The placement of Nissan advertising is not intended to be a political commentary and there are no plans to change the advertising mix at this time,” the company said.
Brand managers face an increasingly hard position between protesting customers and sites such as Breitbart that boast large readerships but offer controversial content.
However, the advertising exodus doesn’t seem to concern Breitbart’s team.
Bloomberg reported that the company’s chief executive, Larry Solov, said in an e-mailed statement to Bloomberg earlier this month that Breitbart “has always and continues to condemn racism and bigotry in any form.”
Fortune could not immediately reach a Breitbart representative, but the site slammed Kellogg for the move, telling the Associated Press in a statement that Kellogg’s move was “to its own detriment” given the size of its readership.
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