• by Wayne Friedman , November 29, 2009

Four months after major advertisers abandoned Fox News Channel's "Glenn Beck" show -- as a result of Beck's calling President Obama a "racist" -- the network has seen little change in marketers' media strategy toward the controversial program.

Beck's ratings pull in hefty daytime audiences -- 2.8 million viewers -- and the show retains middle and small-level daytime advertisers, according to media executives.

There is still no sign of top-drawer, higher-valued daytime TV advertisers, such as Procter & Gamble, Geico, Clorox, UPS Stores and Progressive Insurance. Their ads had previously appeared on the program.

A recent late November airing of "Glenn Beck" offered advertisers pushing gold and silver financial investments and services, older-skewing products and fringe nutritional products.

These include Lifestyle Lift (chin lift); an AARP Medicare product; and retirement homes, such as the TimeSharesOnly and The Villages in Florida -- the latter a community that Beck has done some extra promotional work around.

Other advertisers include Extenze, that notorious male enhancement supplement; TaxMasters; gold-seller, Goldline International; The Wall Street Journal (which is owned by News Corp., the owner of Fox News); silver-seller Investment Rarities; Lifelock.com; auto service insurer USfidelis; and the kitchen product, The 'Ove' Glove.

All this comes despite a recent rush by some major TV advertisers, which have seen program price increases of 20% recently.

Beck's problems started when he called President Obama a "racist," a remark stemming from the arrest of African-American Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. in Cambridge, Mass. in July.

While pressure groups, specifically ColorofChange.org, were successful in pushing big-name TV advertisers off the Beck show -- or persuading other daytime advertisers not to buy -- Fox says it hasn't lost much income.

A Fox News representative, according to a TVnewser.com story, said that Beck advertisers simply moved commercial inventory to other Fox News programs, and that there has been no loss of revenue.