Yum! Brands Discontinues Support of Desperate Housewives     11/26/2004
By Martha Kleder

Concerned citizens achieve the goal.

Yum! Brands, the parent company of Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, KFC, A&W and Long John Silver’s, has stopped advertising on the ABC Network show Desperate Housewives. The move comes after the company’s headquarters were flooded with e-mails and phone calls from concerned customers.

Jonathan Blum, senior vice president of public affairs for Yum! Brands, announced the decision in a letter dated November 17, 2004, to Bill Johnson, president of the American Decency Association (ADA). As posted on ADA’s Web site, the letter reads:

I wanted to inform you that Yum! Brands will not be advertising in Desperate Housewives going forward. We determined that the content of the program is inconsistent without Media Ethics Guidelines. As a result, we have notified ABC and have pulled advertising from the balance of year programming for Pizza Hut and KFC. Our Taco Bell brand had no plans to advertise on Desperate Housewives any time during the remainder of the year.

Johnson and colleagues with the American Family Association have been monitoring the show and informing their constituents of the companies supporting it through advertising. While he is pleased with this development, he still has concerns.

“This decision was a long time coming,” Johnson said, noting that the company went weeks without responding to any of the customer comments made on the matter.

Robert Knight, director of Concerned Women for America’s Culture & Family Institute, said this is good news.

“This is a perfect example of why concerned citizens should never give up, even when it seems their voice is not being heard,” Knight said. “Yum! Brands never responded to the tons of e-mail complaints they received, yet all the while the company was weighing the affect this show was having on the culture and its corporate reputation. They weighed the matter carefully and agreed with their customers.”

“We rejoice that Yum! Brands realizes the import of this decision,” Johnson added. “Desperate Housewives is nasty and destructive to the American family. Burger King made a similar decision weeks ago upon finding out the nature of the program,” he added.

While asking people to contact Yum! Brands and thank them for this move, Johnson also sounds a word of caution. “We now can only hope that Yum! Brands will also steer clear of Life As We Know It [also aired on ABC] and similar types of cultural-rotting programming,” he said.

He added that the ADA’s boycott of Yum! Brands would continue as long as the company continued advertising on Life As We Know It.

Other advertisers remain strong supporters of the new fall dramas. Target and K-Mart are the two most notable examples.

“Here are two companies … that are willing to recklessly place profits before principle. Dirtying the airwaves and sullying untold numbers of children doesn’t concern them much, but greed does,” said Johnson.

Take Action:

To contact Target and K-Mart:

Target Corporation
Mr. Robert Ulrich
1000 Nicollet Mall
Minneapolis, MN 55403
Phone: 612-304-6073 or 1-800-440-0680
Fax: 612-696-3731
To send an e-mail, click here.

Kmart Corporation
Aylwin Lewis
3100 W. Big Beaver Rd.
Troy, MI 48084
Phone: 248-463-1000
Fax: 248-463-5636
To send an e-mail, click here.

Please take a moment to send a note of thanks to Yum! Brands for dropping support of Desperate Housewives and encourage them to do the same with Life As We Know It. Correspondence should be directed to Jonathan Blum, senior vice president of public affairs, Yum! Brands Inc.

To e-mail Mr. Blum, click here.

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