Not long after ABC announced last week that it was pulling the plug on long-running daytime dramas “One Life to Live” and “All My Children” in favor of younger-skewing food and health programming, vacuum maker Hoover announced 4/18 it was pulling all of its advertising from the network starting Friday in the hopes the decision would be reversed. The company is making every attempt to get its commercials off the daytime shows even sooner.
All My Children is set to go off the air in September, and One Life to Live will end in January.
The company’s VP/Marketing, Brian Kirkendall, said fans should email [email protected] if they want to “help pull together the mass emotional outpouring of support for our beloved ABC soaps and get it to our contacts.”
Kirkendall’s letter, found on Facebook:
“To all the loyal ABC soap fans,
I want you to know from me personally that we hear you loud and clear. My wife and mother are both passionate viewers of All My Children and One Life to Live, as are many of my colleagues here at Hoover. We were and are as disappointed with this news as you are.
In fact, we will discontinue our advertising with ABC this Friday, 4/22. We’re making every attempt to pull our spots from these programs sooner.
Because we feel that’s not enough, we also want to help get your voice heard with ABC. So, we’ve set up a special email address, [email protected], to help pull together the mass emotional outpouring of support for our beloved ABC soaps and get it to our contacts at ABC. Please, send your emails to us at [email protected], and we’ll get every, single last one of them to ABC.
We’re 150% committed to doing what matters most to you – so if there’s anything else we can do to help or you have any ideas, please email this address, and we will respond to you personally.
Thank you for standing up for what matters to you! We need more of that in this world.
Brian Kirkendall
Vice President of Marketing
Hoover”
RBR-TVBR observation: It’s rare that an advertiser starts a grass-roots effort with a program’s viewers like this. And they mean business, pulling all ads from the network. Of course, in today’s world much more firepower can be added to the effort with Facebook. In another sense, it’s not necessarily wise to keep ads running on a show that’s sentenced to death. What may happen is scores of “semi-loyal” fans of the show may stop watching because they know it will not be around much longer. Time will tell and with enough support in the effort, the shows may end up staying, or moving to another network.
