Agency Attacks Boston Globe For Rejecting Web-Site Ad
May 04, 2011
With a new advertising policy related to the Internet, the Boston Globe is showing that newspapers still have some power in an electronic age: the power to anger their customers. In letters to the Massachusetts attorney general and the Federal Trade Commission, a small advertising agency accused the Globe of engaging in a possibly unlawful restraint of trade for rejecting print ads for the agency's site on the World Wide Web, the Internet's multimedia segment. The company, PrimeNetix Corp. said the newspaper, in turning down the ads for ``cablecars.com,'' was being overly protective of its own Web franchise, ``boston.com,'' which includes advertisements for automobiles, real estate and jobs, among other services. Like many interactive enterprises, both allow users to sift through listings of cars for sale and sort them by year, make or style. PrimeNetix President Neil Geier said that when the Globe initially rejected his ad, it sent him a copy of a new policy that said ads with Internet addresses appearing in the paper's automotive section must be primarily for selling cars. The addresses, the policy said, shouldn't take up more than 10% of the ad. But when Mr. Geier resubmitted the advertisement with smaller letters that complied with the space requirement, it was still rejected, he said. ``My feeling is, they're afraid of the competition,'' said Mr. Geier, who also heads a company that brokers printed automotive ads from about 70 dealers to the Globe and other newspapers, radio and television stations in the region. ``I don't mean to declare war on them ... but this is a case of them figuring out how they can become more restrictive.'' Mr. Geier told the FTC the policy puts him at a disadvantage and would unfairly exclude him from the section of the paper scanned by most car buyers. The Globe, Boston's largest newspaper, is owned by Times Co.. The Globe declined to comment on the complaint but suggested it might have accepted Mr. Geier's ad in a different part of the newspaper at a higher rate. Newspapers have wide legal latitude to reject advertising but typically do so on grounds of taste, potential legal liabilities or questions about the accuracy of contents. Officials at both the FTC and the Massachusetts attorney general's office said they couldn't recall a Web-related complaint about a rejected ad. But analysts said such disputes will probably increase as the Internet blurs the lines between advertisers, publishers and ad agencies trying to attract consumers. Johnetta Moses, a media analyst at Lynch, Jones & Ryan Inc. in New York, said Mr. Geier ``should count himself lucky the Globe accepts advertising at all from him,'' since many newspapers will decline to work with similar advertising agencies that handle content for automobile ads. ``I suspect the reason they do is to avoid exactly this kind of tussle.''
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