2. A highly-reliable journalist has reported to us that the prestigious and world-renowned Guggenheim Museum in New York has dropped its advertising with Village Voice Media.
New York, NY|Advertisers|Thursday, May 10, 2012Add Comment
Kevin Roderick reported in the LA Observed yesterday: “The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art announced that it would suspend all advertising in SF Weekly, citing the trafficking of children for sex through parent Village Voice Media‘s Backpage.com. Via release”
If we come across that actual press release we will post it for you.
Harkins Theatres is a privately owned movie theater chain with locations throughout the Southwestern United States. It decided to no longer advertise in the Phoenix New Times. The New Times parent company Village Voice Media owns Backpage.com. Harkins Theatres is in good company with other companies who have pulled advertising such as American Airlines, AT&T and Pfizer.
Twenty seven major advertisers, including H&M, AT&T, and Ikea, have pulled their ads from Village Voice Media due to the company’s alleged links to child sex trafficking.
Justin Wassel, a minister from Ohio, started a Change.org campaign asking U.S. companies to pull advertising from Village Voice Media after one of its properties, Backpage.com, was accused of allowing advertisements that support child sex trafficking.
Mayor Mike McGinn has written a letter to Village Voice Media CEO Jim Larkin expressing concerns about Backpage.com, the VVM-owned classified site that has been implicated in a long string of underage prostitution charges.
In the letter, McGinn noted that the policies VVM claimed they had in place to prevent pimps from trafficking underage prostitutes do not appear to be working; last month, for example, Seattle police rescued a 17-year-old girl who was posting Backpage ads for herself on a public library computer on behalf of her pimp, who remains at large.
Best Buy Co. Inc. doesn’t advertise with Village Voice Media, the publisher that owns the Minneapolis-based weekly City Pages. But the retailer is still being drawn into a controversy involving the sex-business ads that are run by Village Voice.
The nonprofit group Change.org, which is pressuring businesses to pledge not to advertise with the New York-based media company, said Thursday that Best Buy Co. Inc. (along with IKEA , AT&T , Barnes & Noble, the Miami Dolphins and other well-known companies) has agreed not to advertise in the paper.
