But that’s precisely what Undertone, the online ad network operator, did the evening of Monday, April 30.

What’s even stranger about what they’re saying is where they chose to say it.

Selling your product by knocking it?

Undertone says its online advertising is the way for brands to “stand out and be remembered.”

To prove this, they’re telling advertising agency decision-makers across the country that online ads get lost in massive clutter and are therefore forgotten.

Specifically, they’re saying that more than 4.8 billion online display ads appeared last year (including, in all probability, a whole bunch from Undertone clients).

Then they’re asking, “How many do you remember?” “In fact”, says Media Online Daily, they “go out of their way to point out how forgettable online ads actually are.”

Not exactly the most convincing argument for buying online display advertising.

If your medium’s so good, why do you have to use a competitor?

What’s even stranger than the message is the medium they’ve chosen for it. “Undertone isn’t using the medium it pitches to advertisers and agencies,” MediaPost editor Joe Mandese reports, “it’s utilizing television.”

Undertone bought two 30-second spots on AMC cable’s season premier of “The Pitch,” a reality series about advertising agencies competing for new business.

It’s certainly not an efficient buy. They’ll be spending an estimated $112,000 plus at least that much in production costs to reach a handful of media buyers at the Martin Agency and their counterparts outside Richmond. The cost per thousand (media cost divided by the number of people in your target audience, expressed as a fraction of one thousand) must be so astronomical, it rivals the federal deficit.

The rationale for the buy undercuts the rationale for the online display advertising that Undertone is trying to sell.

Online advertising’s main selling points are that (1) it’s cheaper than traditional media and (2) it targets visitors behaviorally; in this case, that would mean having the ability to pop up on advertising decision-makers’ displays when they’re thinking about advertising decisions.

Maybe more advertising people will be watching “The Pitch” than other cable shows. But that’s not necessarily a lot of decision-makers. And nobody knows for sure how many will be watching nor how long they’ll stay tuned.

One thing we do know is that when Undertone has to use television to push its online ad network, or when consumer brands buy national network and cable television to drive traffic to their websites and Facebook pages, that indicates a certain, shall we say, lack of confidence in the effectiveness of online media.

Some people still believe in Bigfoot, too.

The phrase “subliminal advertising” has a long and checkered history. James Vicary coined it in 1957, on the basis of a research study he allegedly conducted in a movie theater. In his initial account, he said that “Drink Coca-Cola” and “Eat popcorn” were flashed on the movie screen — too briefly for anyone to consciously notice — and Coke and popcorn sales went up as a result.

An admitted hoax

Five years later, in a 1962 Advertising Age interview, Vicary admitted that the study was, in his words, a “gimmick” and the whole idea of subliminal advertising was a hoax.

But that hasn’t stopped people who should know better from believing in it, the way some folks believe in the existence of Bigfoot.

In 1974, a book by Wilson Brian Key claimed that advertising agencies were retouching sexual images into, among other things, ice cube photos to subliminally seduce consumers into buying advertised brands of liquor.

The most recent book claiming the existence of subliminal advertising came out a little over two years ago, on April 22, 2010.

Does “subliminal” just mean “subtle”?

Over the course of those years, “subliminal” has taken on a different meaning when applied to advertising — hidden, subtle, too hard to notice.

In that highly corrupted sense of the word, subliminal advertising of a sort may be said to exist, in brand logos.

Logo designers, whether working locally in Richmond or globally, specialize in nonverbal communication. When assigned to create a logo, they’ll create anywhere from half a dozen to thousands (charging anywhere from a few hundred dollars to a few million). And each of their designs will ideally have some graphic, nonverbal, way of trying to communicate some feature or selling point of the brand whose logo it’s intended to be.

That’s not a matter of psychological or emotional appeal, which advertisers do use, but simply graphic designers doing their stuff. Sometimes they do it so poorly, the nonverbal communication is too subtle for anyone except a fellow logo designer to even notice, much less comprehend.

That’s when it’s called hidden communication, or subliminal.

You be the judge

So check out the well-known (for the most part) logos in this slideshow. There’s a piece of nonverbal communication in each. That nonverbal communication may be too subtle to notice. If you do spot it, its intended meaning may be too obscure to figure out. (If you can’t, the caption below each logo will explain it.)

Now: Are those logos being subliminal? Are they just subtle? Are they too subtle for their own good? Are they downright obscure? Did you enjoy trying to figure them out?

We report. You decide.

According to reviewer William Saletan, Haidt wrote The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion with an agenda, namely, “to enrich liberalism, and political discourse generally, with a deeper awareness of human nature.”

A funny thing happened on the way to that deeper awareness

To this end, he paid University of Virginia (a public university) researchers to conduct “a massive online survey” and “ask people moral questions, time their responses and scan their brains…[T]heir answers and brain activation patterns indicate[d] that they reach conclusions quickly and produce reasons later only to justify what they’ve decided.”

Reasoning, Haidt reasons, is “post-hoc and justificatory,” writes Peter Wehner. “Reasoning is not good at finding the truth, according to Haidt. We’re all like good lawyers or press secretaries; we seek out information to reinforce our existing opinions and try to justify everything,” he adds.

Or, as Saletan put it more pretentiously (He does write for the Times, you know.):

In Haidt’s retelling, all the fools, foils and villains of intellectual history are recast as heroes. David Hume, the Scottish philosopher who notoriously said reason was fit only to be ‘the slave of the passions,’ was largely correct.

So what else is new?

Of course, Haidt could have saved himself years of research and writing and the Commonwealth of Virginia’s taxpayers who knows how many thousands of dollars if only he’d checked with a competent advertising person instead.

For at least half a century, advertising practitioners have known that people make purchase decisions with their hearts, not their heads; that they make an emotional leap to a product or brand decision, then build a bridge of logic afterwards to support it.

This is why most of the new-car ad readers are people who just bought that make of car and are looking to justify their purchase — and why, back when Ogilvy & Mather handled the Mercedes advertising, they filled the long-copy ads with facts and figures that would reassure a new owner, not lure a new prospect.

It’s why McDonalds has happy meals for kids and Ronald McDonald — and why cereal and soda brands try to win them over while they’re young, with a lifetime of purchasing patterns ahead of them.

It’s why consumers buy from brands whose personalities they like and shun others, often with better products, whose personalities they don’t.

It’s why realtors tell homeowners to have cookies baking in the oven when they show the house to prospective buyers — and why there are four, count ‘em, four products on Amazon’s site that give cars that new-car smell.

And it’s why even heartless monopolies like the Bell System were able to get people to make more (then-expensive) long-distance calls back in the ’70s with tear-jerking television commercials and slogans like “Reach Out and Touch Someone.”

Better late than never

So welcome to the club, Professor Haidt. Nice to have you with us. Too bad you didn’t see the light sooner.

But then, you wouldn’t have that book deal, would you?

But while the Huggies commercial provoked instant outrage from Richmond, Virginia, to Richmond, California, reaction to the Liquid Plumr video has been…silence.

Why?

Promotion or pornography?

The commercial is filled with demeaning double entendres.

It opens with a woman in a supermarket aisle, dreamily repeating aloud the words on the Liquid Plumr label: “Double Impact…Double Impact.” With each repetition, her eyes glaze and her breathing becomes heavier.

We dissolve to her, at home, opening the front door as one of what the YouTube caption calls “the two sexiest plumbers ever”  shows up “to snake your drain.”

He’s followed by the second, who’s “here to flush your pipe.” Get it?

As disco-era romantic music fades up, she squeals, closes the door, lets her hair down, licks her lips, and follows them up to the bathroom.

As she snuggles up between the two plumbers, demonstration footage cuts in, and a deep male voice talks about product features, such as a “lo-o-o-ng snake…to break up clogs, baby.”

We then dissolve back to her in the supermarket aisle, coming out of what was a reverie about the plumbers — a reverie so powerful that she grabs several containers of the stuff and scurries, shamefaced, toward checkout.

Insulting the target audience

Most drain-cleaning products are bought by women, not men, so it’s obvious from the YouTube comments that this commercial missed the mark:

I bought Liquid Plumr and nothing happened. Maybe it’s cuz [sic] I’m a dude.

I’d flush her pipe any day.

Is it gay if their snakes touch?

One commenter figured exactly what game Clorox, Liquid Plumr’s parent company, was playing:

Calling it double penetration was probably too blatant to get away with, so they had to settle with “impact.”

Many women echoed these sentiments on Liquid Plumr’s Facebook page:

I find it quite pitiful that Liquid Plumr has joined the new age of we need sex to sell our product. I won’t be purchasing it any longer.

I was very offended when I saw this commercial for the first time today. I was watching TV with my children who are on Spring Break. I will no longer be purchasing any Liquid Plumber [sic] products.

Are companies so short on advertising ideas that they turn to sexual inuendos [sic] to help sell their products?

But there were as many, if not more, others who found the video just dandy.

Invisibility is no excuse

Maybe the reason nobody’s spoken out against this commercial is that nobody’s seen it. On YouTube, it’s had only 8,093 views. (By way of comparison, a parody of this spot, from “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” got 10,983 YouTube views.)

Well, now you’ve seen it.

If women can come forward to protest Huggies demeaning men, it’s only fair that men — and women — step up to return the favor.

According to a survey whose results Ad Age released April 16, there’s a new way for advertisers to look at consumer audiences — not by geography, not by exhaustive demographics, not by psychographics, not even by focus grouping or other forms of expensive research, but by what kind of county they live in.

The PatchworkNation.com survey broke the nation’s counties into 12 demographic/ behavioral categories. Then they asked 25,000 consumers across the nation which first-run network shows they’d watched during the previous seven days, on both broadcast and cable television. When they correlated the data by county, they found surprising paradoxes — and also a very interesting shortcut advertisers can use to make television buys more efficient and more effective.

You can’t tell the players without a scorecard

In order to understand the conclusions — and use them to get more advertising results for your money — you first have to understand what the 12 different county types are:

• Boom Towns: Fast-growing communities with rapidly diversifying (but very largely white and Anglo) populations. Hanover, Henrico and Chesterfield Counties are all Boom Towns.
• Monied ‘Burbs: Wealthier, highly educated communities (again, largely white and Anglo) whose median incomes are $15,000 a year above the national average. Goochland County is a Monied ‘Burb. So is San Mateo County in California.
• Minority Central: Large pockets of Black residents but a below-average percentage of Asians and Latinos. The City of Richmond falls into this category, as does, for example, Baton Rouge, LA.
• Campus and Careers: Cities and towns with young, educated populations. They’re more secular and Democratic. Ann Arbor, MI, is a quintessential example.
• Emptying Nests: Populated largely by retirees and aging Baby Boomers. Less diverse and more affluent than the nation as a whole. Evenly split between Republicans and Democrats. Clermont, FL, is an Emptying Nest community.
• Immigration Nation: Large Latino populations with below-average incomes,  clustered mainly in the South and Southwest — like Laredo, TX.
• Industrial Metropolis: Densely populated, very ethnically diverse cities, higher-than-average income, voters lean Democratic. Examples: St. Louis and Philadelphia.
• Military Bastions: High military and military-related employment, lots of retired veterans, likely Republican voters. The Hampton Roads area, including Norfolk and Virginia Beach, is one.
• Mormon Outposts: Overwhelmingly (95%) white, significantly (28%) Mormon, very (70+%) Republican, slightly higher median household incomes, mainly in and around Utah, as you might expect. Provo, UT, and Twin Falls, ID, are examples.
• Service Worker Centers: Mainly in the Northeast and Great Lakes regions. Small to midsize towns with economies fueled by hotels, stores and restaurants. Median household income ($34,000) lower than average. St. Lawrence County, NY, is a Service Worker Center.
• Tractor Country: As the name implies, rural and remote small towns with older populations and large agricultural sectors. Mostly in the northern Midwest, like Sioux City, IA.

It’s this widely varying demographic geography that drives widely differing television choices.

Paradox #1

The most-watched shows nationally may be among the shows least watched by your target audience.

According to the April 17 overnight Nielsen ratings, “NCIS” was the nation’s most-watched broadcast television show, with 17,616,000 viewers. But Richmond’s most-watched broadcast show was “Cold Case,” and the surrounding counties’ choice was “Raising Hope” on Fox. This demographic/geographic segmentation explains it.

It also explains why “Mike & Molly” does at least 20% better in Clermont, FL, and St. Lawrence County, NY, than it averages nationally.

Paradox #2

Counties right next to each other can be miles apart in viewing preferences. Goochland County prefers “Modern Family” on ABC and “Masterpiece” on cable, while Henrico, Hanover and Chesterfield choose “Raising Hope” and “Top Shot” and the City of Richmond tunes in to CBS’s “Cold Case” on broadcast and “Bobby Jones Gospel” on cable.

Shortcut #1

So if you’re selling to an audience segment instead of a general audience, let those findings be your guide.

If you’re targeting affluent suburbanites, for example, buy adjacencies to “Raising Hope” and “Modern Family” on broadcast. Or buy time in “Masterpiece” to reach Goochland by cable and “Top Shot” to reach Chesterfield, Hanover, and Henrico.

Shortcut #2

It also makes sense to tailor your commercials’ message and executional style to the program each key audience segment will be watching. A spot that’s a good fit for “Bobby Jones Gospel” won’t work so well on “Top Shot,” and vice versa.

The bottom line

Follow these shortcuts, and you’ll save money on air time, because the time you buy will be on less-expensive, lower-rated programs. You’ll also get more results, because you’ll be reaching more of your target prospects and talking to them in their own frame of reference.

Watch out for unexpected side effects.

Of the 5,754 registered hospitals in the U.S., only 1,129 — a little over one in five — actively use social media, according to an April 10 mediapost.com report.

More should.

Because many of social marketing’s weaknesses are strengths for the healthcare industry.

Time’s not of the essence

The problem with social marketing for most advertisers is that it works s-l-o-w-l-y. It can take months to build an audience of followers, to establish a dialog, to convert passive liking into active choice.

If you’re trying to get consumers to come in and buy now, that’s frustrating at best and wasteful at worst. But not for hospitals. Hospital admission is not something anyone can build demand for. You go to the hospital because you need to, not because you want to — when you’re sick, when you’re pregnant, when you’ve been injured in an accident, when you need an MRI or some other heavy-duty form of lab work.

All the advertising in the world can’t make a healthy person want to go to a hospital.

But that’s okay, because no one’s in a hurry to. There’s plenty of time for the kind of reputation management that social media can excel at to make people who’ll become sick or injured one day feel better about the hospital they have to go to.

Acceptance, not preference

Most advertising, regardless of medium, works to get target audiences to choose the brand being advertised. With hospitals, they often can’t; their health insurer does it for them.

Here in Richmond, for example, only Bon Secours hospitals were in the Optima medicare PPO’s system. If you needed to go to MCV or wanted to go to Henrico Doctors Hospital, there’d be a big cash penalty.

It’s hard, if not impossible, to build a strong enough preference to overcome that. But it’s much easier to build acceptance among patients who have to come to your hospital and help them feel reassured, in advance, about being there.

Made to order

Some 87% of hospitals that do social marketing use Facebook pages, encouraging potential patients to “like” them. This plays directly to a strength of social marketing.

Seventy-seven percent use Foursquare, where consumers can “check in” and read what other people have to say about the hospital. This plays directly to a strength of Internet use — consumers’ ability to check others’ opinions and ratings before they buy.

Two-thirds use Twitter, for the timeliness other social applications can’t offer — announcing anything from job openings to wellness events and timely health information (e.g., flu shots in November) to clinical trial recruitment.

Side effects may include…

But like many things in the medical world, there can be side effects.

On the inbound side, social media provide excellent soapboxes for patients who feel mistreated to air their grievances.

On the outbound side, there’s the risk of breaching privacy or security. Someone on the staff could indvertently or, even worse, imappropriately share confidential information — and repercussions from that can be even worse than disgruntled patient comments.

Prevention is the best cure

That’s why it’s important for hospitals using social media to carefully monitor what’s being said on their pages and their accounts and vital to have a specific social media management policy in place.

Unfortunately, according to PowerDMS, most don’t.

Only 31% of hospitals using social media have a specific management policy, while 45% have no policy at all.

So it’s hardly surprising that while 24% of hospitals surveyed had to discipline an employee for social media behavior, nearly twice as many — 42% — did just three years later.

Use as directed

Here are five simple guidlines that hospitals should make integral parts of their social media management policy:

1. Be responsible — Take responsibility for what you post, and always use good judgment and common sense.
2. Be accountable — Employees post more responsibly when they have to include their own names and job titles.
3. Respect your audience — They’re your patients, your present or future colleagues, your vendors, so alienate them at your peril.
4. Respect copyrights and fair use — And when you’re making fair use of someone else’s content, give attribution (and links, if possible).
5. Be transparent but not too transparent — Transparency plays an important role in building the kind of mutually supportive community that social media seem to be designed for. But being transparent doesn’t mean baring all. Make sure employees know how to protect confidential, private and proprietary information.

So if you’re a healthcare provider actively using social marketing, better get those specific guidelines in place and enforce them, to make sure your social marketing does no harm. That way, if you do have problems, at least they won’t be iatrogenic.

More spohisticated than you think

Question: How did the personal-injury lawyer get hurt in an accident?

Answer: The ambulance stopped suddenly.

Personal-injury and class-action attorneys are not exactly held in the greatest esteem.

But according to a report that New Media Strategies (NMS), based in Arlington, VA, compiled for the Institue for Legal Reform (ILR), they deserve respect for the sophisticated techniques they bring to digital marketing — though not necessarily for how ethically they apply them.

“Hi, I’m Joel Bieber”

It’s no surprise to anyone in Richmond with two eyes, two ears and a television in working order that lawyers spend heavily on television advertising. But that’s a drop in the bucket compared to what they spend, less visibly, on digital advertising.

Trial-lawyer firms spend “millions of dollars [on] the creation and maintenance of  websites, Facebook pages, Twitter handles, blogs and YouTube channels,” NMS reports.

More than 800 of these law firms buy keyword advertising on Google Adwords.

At least 25 of them spend at least $50 million a year on it alone. I guess you have to when sponsored links for, say, “mesothelioma” run $80 a click.

Trawling for clients online

Keyword advertising is only the beginning. It leads to a network of what Ad Age calls “interconnected websites and social-media campaigns sponsored by the plaintiffs’ bar…that are little more than web-surfer flytraps designed to capture the personal contact information of potential clients.”

How those campaigns work is the result of one smart insight and a lot of sleaze.

The smart insight

Knowingly or not, the trial lawyers have taken a leaf from the public relations agencies’ book. The key to getting press releases placed in media is not talking about your brand and what it wants readers to see. Rather, it’s about giving information of interest to readers and their concerns that just happens to be related to your brand as a solution.

Law-firm digital advertising builds on this insight. It has one set of websites, etc., for people who’ve decided they need a lawyer and another whole set for people who have a problem and are just seeking information about it.

“Firms will often create separate online presences to capture both counsel-seekers and information-seekers,” notes the ILR, and good SEO can get them top rankings in Google searches.

There’s nothing wrong – and a lot right – about separate communications for counsel seekers and information seekers.

Counsel seekers neither need nor want to scroll through lots of information about whatever they’ve decided to sue about; they just need to see which lawyer might be best to represent them.

Information seekers, on the other hand, know they have a problem, but not necessarily one that’s worth litigating. To get right into a sales pitch for the lawyer would at best leave them ignorant and confused and at worst scare them away.

So far, so good. But now things start getting sleazy.

The sleaze

Too many law firms develop those information-seeker campaigns misleadingly. As the ILR reports:

These websites are positioned as patient support groups, medical resources, official government sites and even advocacy organizations. They often have official-sounding domain extensions such as .org and .us. While usually (though not always) disclosed in fine print that the sites are part of a marketing communication by a law firm, the content and visual aspect of the sites appear to be purely informational.

This is not only unethical, but may even be illegal.

Do what’s smart, not what’s wrong

Now, if you’re a local Richmond advertiser, you don’t have $50 million a year to spend just on Google Adwords.

But there are some smart marketing things you can do for next to nothing:

• Recognize the difference between product seekers and information seekers.
• Do separate ads, maybe separate websites, for each. Many host companies’ basic packages let you put up more than one site for the basic annual fee. (Though you’ll have to spend all of $10 a year to register a domain name for your second site.) If that sounds too intimidating, you can always add more specifically targeted buttons and pages to your current site.
• Recognize that more of your readers or visitors will be information seekers than product seekers, so create your content accordingly. Talk about what their needs and problems are, and how your product solves them — not about your company’s general wonderfulness. See examples here, here, here and here.

And finally, while developing and naming your site, Twitter handle, Facebook page, etc., remember this: Conveying general information for your category is not only smart but also ethical. Passing it off as something from the government isn’t. It can get you in trouble – maybe enough trouble for one of those lawyers to come after you.

Is this what they're really selling?

Precisely at nine Friday morning, Richmond time, Chrysler posted (on YouTube) four of the longer, 60-second commercials we warned you were coming.

The spots themselves will start airing on the NCAA men’s basketball finals Saturday, the American Country Music Awards Sunday and “Mad Men” on AMC cable.

When and if you watch them, one question will spring to mind, namely, “Just what is it they’re selling?” Because whatever they’re selling certainly isn’t cars and trucks.

Commercials or product placements?

My online dictionary says an advertisement is “a notice…in a public medium promoting a product, service or event or publicizing a job vacancy.” Which means these new spots from Chrysler aren’t advertisements.

Well, television is “a public medium.” But no way are those :60s “promoting a product, service or event.”

The Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep and Ram vehicles in the video are just product placements, much like the Chrysler cars Mark Harmon drives in “NCSI.” Car makes — in fact even references to cars at all — never turn up even once in the voice-over.

So what’s going on here? The answer may lie in the fact that Chrysler is a partly-owned subsidiary of the United States government.

America’s second half or Obama’s fourth quarter?

According to Ad Age, Chrysler’s positioning the campaign as “the next installment” of their controversial two-minute “America at Halftime” Super Bowl spot — but with a difference. “[A]s Chrysler terms it, this is ‘the second half,’” they report, adding that “[t]he new spots…are themed to the same ‘hope and encouragement’ message…”

“Each spot…show[s] the things [people] are doing every day to move forward and win their own second half,” blogged Chrysler/FIAT CMO Olivier Francois. “They are intended to be stories of hope…”

Hmm, “hope.” Where have we heard that before?

Selling points or talking points?

Analyze the content of the voice-overs and end titles, and you’ll find some familiar memes there, too:

• The troops are coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan: In the commercial called “Shaun in the Challenger,” a Marine returned from deployment talks (in the voice-over) about the war’s toll on his son: “It was hard on him…he had to wait for his father.”
• Don’t believe your lying eyes; the economy’s really, really recovering: “Mom’s up early, too. She’s got a job now,” (“Jenny in the Jeep Wrangler”) and “I know it’s been hard…You just said, ‘Where there’s a truck, there’s a job…and you were right,’” (“Tommy Ram”).
• Your disagreement doesn’t matter: “I don’t always agree with him, but he makes the game follow him.” (“My Son Steven“)
• Vague future promises trump demonstrated failures: “If we can’t find a way, we’ll make one,” (“Jenny” end title). “All that matters is what’s ahead,” (“Shaun” end title).

So maybe these commercials are commercials after all. There’s one criterion in the dictionary definition they do meet; in shorthand and dog whistles, they work to publicize a job vacancy. You know — the one we’ll all be voting to fill the first Tuesday of November.

Don't overpromise. MoveOn and Media Matters did.

This time, they were really going to get him.

MoveOn.org was going to get him kicked off 180 radio stations.

Media Matters for America was going to get 100 national advertisers to cancel their spots on his show.

So how did the Great Rush Limbaugh Ad Boycott work? Not exactly as expected — and even its organizers admit it.

“Real consequences?”

“The objective has been to show that there are real consequences” for “someone like Mr. Limbaugh or his company,” said Angelo Carusone of Media Matters. But how real were they?

News reports said that more than 100 national advertisers had canceled air time on Rush Limbaugh’s midday show. That was more wishful thinking than fact.

To begin with, Limbaugh never had as many as 100 national advertisers at a time. If he did, his talk show would be wall-to-wall commercials. What’s more, industry newsletter Radio-Info.com reported on March 27 that there were 98 national advertisers — which is less, not more, than 100.

They said they didn’t want their commercials running near content “deemed to be objectionable or controversial,” a description that includes many shows besides Limbaugh’s.

Their hiatus was only for the weeks of March 12 and 19, and they’re back on air this week.

And according to a March 28 Washington Post report, lots of those sponsors weren’t Limbaugh sponsors in the first place.

What’s more, you may have heard one of those national sponsors reported to have dropped Limbaugh’s show — Habeeb Carpets — actually started advertising on it here in Richmond during the alleged boycott period, to announce their aquisition of a local carpet cleaning company.

“Contrary to the wishful thinking of the professional special interest groups, reports of sponsors fleeing the ‘Rush Limbaugh Show’ are greatly exaggerated,” said Premiere spokeswoman Rachel Nelson. “In fact, the program retains virtually all of its long-term sponsors, who continue to have great success.”

Drops in the bucket

How close to its goal did MoveOn’s petition drive get to forcing Limbaugh off 180 radio stations? Well, they missed by 178.

A grand total of two small stations — one in Western Massachusetts, the other in Hilo, Hawaii — said they’d drop his show. That leaves Rush on the airwaves of a mere 598 Clear Channel radio stations across the country.

Looked at another way, that’s a 0.3% loss of radio stations — and an even smaller loss of audience, since the two stations were in small markets.

The same principle applies to local advertisers. Most of the defecting advertisers ran commecials only in local or regional markets, Media Matters’ Carusone admitted. Simple arithmetic shows that one local market equals 0.1% of Limbaugh’s radio network.

The biggest loss was self-inflicted

It turns out that if anyone was boycotting Limbaugh, it was his own syndicator, Premiere Radio Networks. For the weeks of March 12 and 19, the Clear Channel subsidiary told stations to suspend “barter” spots, which come at discounted rates, for local advertisers. This week, they told the stations to resume running them.

Overpromising is dangerous

What’s true for political groups is equally true for advertisers: Watch out what you claim or promise. Big promises may sound great and make you feel important. But if you fail to deliver, you’ll lose all credibility.

Steven Biel, director of SignOn.org, the site MoveOn created for its petition drive to kick Limbaugh off all those stations, said this will make Rush think twice in the future.

I’ll bet he’s really quaking in his boots.

Talk is cheap.