• 'The Tagline'/BNET, Thursday, April 21, 2011 10:16 AM

Hoover got lots of publicity earlier this week when it announced the pulling of all its ads from ABC to protest the cancellation of daytime soap operas "All My Children" and "One Life to Live."  But publicity was precisely the point of the move, writes Jim Edwards in BNET's ad industry column "The Tagline." And that, according to the BNET headline, made a "mostly bogus boycott" into an "act of PR genius."

Using figures reported by Ad Age's Brian Steinberg, Edwards points out that the vacuum cleaner marketer's total annual spend on ABC is only $353,000 ($243,000 on soaps). But, within a couple of days, Hoover had received 4,000 supportive emails from soap fans and 13,000 "new(ish)" Facebook fans, so marketing VP Brian Kirkendall "just earned his brands more in PR than he lost in TV exposure."

Read the whole story at 'The Tagline'/BNET »