Dow Jones Nixes CNBC Ads

Eighty-seven thousand dollars worth of CNBC ads destined for MarketWatch.com and WSJ.com were voided (for the time being) by Dow Jones in the lead-up to the launch of the Fox Business Channel, as reported yesterday in The New York Times. MarketWatch.com and WSJ.com instead ran ads for Fox Business Network. Today the story achieves full media traction, revisited by The Times as well as The Wall Street Journal.

Yesterday’s New York Times article on the subject raised questions as to whether or not the ad renege could be construed as the first sign of a disintegration of editorial integrity of the Journal. As Bill Carter wrote, ”Last Tuesday night, CNBC’s ad buyers received a call from a Dow Jones representative saying that those ads could not run (Monday), the first day of Fox’s competing channel.” And, from today’s WSJ:

”A Fox Business spokeswoman said the network didn’t learn of the CNBC campaign until after Dow Jones decided to pull the ads.

”The advertising contract was signed Sept. 11, 2007, and included specific provisions for Oct. 15, the Fox Business Network launch date, according to a copy of the contract reviewed by the Journal. On that date, CNBC agreed to spend $59,500 to buy all of the ad space on Dow Jones’s marketwatch.com site, and agreed to an additional $27,500 to make sure any visitor to MarketWatch’s home page would first see an advertisement from CNBC. This is known in ad parlance as a ‘roadblock.’

”The significance of the date evidently went unnoticed by the online advertising-sales representative at Dow Jones who signed the contract. But last week, as the launch of the Fox Business Network approached, news of the ad deal worked its way up through Dow Jones’s ranks to Todd Larsen, chief operating officer of Dow Jones’s consumer-media group, who informed his boss, L. Gordon Crovitz, the division’s president and publisher of The Wall Street Journal, who in turn informed Richard F. Zannino, Dow Jones’s chief executive, according to people familiar with the matter.”

Dow Jones and CNBC are presently in discussions to move the eighty seven thousand dollar ad buy to a different day.

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