I watched the Media Matters video about companies that are funding the Glenn Beck show and decided to do my part and write State Farm, Red Lobster, and Wal-mart an email to express my concern with their advertising decision. I had already written to Progressive Insurance, Lawyers.com, and Proctor and Gamble to commend their decision to pull their ads from his show, and my emails were greeted with personal responses. That was motivation enough to write these.
Update: Title changed to reflect the wishes of the comments
Here is what I sent:
It has recently come to my attention that State Farm is a corporate sponsor for the Glenn Beck show. The past few months have shown this man to be knowingly stoking the flames of violence through hate speech, deceit, and demagoguery. He has called our president a 'racist', made jokes about poisoning Speaker Pelosi, and has used such violent language as 'driving a stake through their heart'. Several of his sponsors, including Progressive Insurance and Proctor and Gamble, have pulled their advertisements from his program in response to these remarks. I respectfully ask that State Farm Insurance seriously reconsider their corporate sponsorship of the Glenn Beck program. I strongly believe that this hate speech is not something with which your company would like to be associated. Choosing to remove your sponsorship would make a strong statement that State Farm does not endorse such actions against our elected officials. Thank you.
Obviously I changed the company name based on who I was writing to (although I think I accidentally called Red Lobster, "Red Lobster Insurance"). Within several hours, I got a response from State Farm:
"Dear Steve,
Thank you for your recent e-mail concerning State Farm’s advertising on the Fox network.
We have a policy of not advertising on political or opinion programming. We have corrected this issue and have taken steps to make sure it does not happen again.
Understanding our millions of customers and thousands of associates hold a full spectrum of views on political issues, State Farm has a long-standing practice of not advertising in political discussion programming regardless of a program’s political point of view.
Because of the recent situation, State Farm is now evaluating its commercial placement practices to ensure its political issues advertising guidelines are maintained.
Thank you for your e-mail.
Sincerely,
Jairon L. Wills
Executive Customer Service Supervisor
State Farm Insurance "
I can't guarantee that they'll actually do anything about it, but I think that this is an excellent response. Update: Reading through the comments, I realized that people are right - this letter totally said that they have 'corrected this issue', possibly implying that they are actually pulling their ads. This is an EXTREMELY excellent response. Hopefully we can all do a small part to make these companies aware of the hate speech which they are endorsing.
I'll provide links to their contact pages, and I urge everyone to write them and let them know that we don't approve of their sponsorship of Glenn Beck!
State Farm
Red Lobster
Dirt-mart
Update: I sent a concise thank you note:
Jairon,
Thank you for your prompt and personal response. I appreciate your willingness to evaluate your advertisement placement, and will speak highly of the manner in which you handled the situation.
Best.