Dita De Boni: Stop, look and listen

Illustration / Anna Crichton

In September last year, one of Australia's most bloviated buffoons, talkback host Alan Jones, made a comment about the death of then-Prime Minister Julia Gillard's father at a private function in Sydney, which was covertly taped by New Zealand's Jonathan Marshall and duly published several days later.

Like many of his ilk who enjoy polluting the morning air with their hateful nonsense - on this side of the Tasman as well - Jones was on a mission: he had spent weeks tearing down Gillard, including saying she should be put into a chaff bag and thrown into the sea. None of this had overly concerned advertisers, who flocked to Jones' market-leading morning show.

That was, until that recording of him opining that Gillard's father, recently deceased, had "died of shame ... [to] think he had a daughter who told lies every time she stood for parliament".

Social media campaigners immediately mobilised to get 60 advertisers to pull their business with the show, and 15 of those vowed never to return. The Jones saga cost Sydney's 2GB some $1.5 million in advertising revenue.

Jones returned in October after a display of disingenuous contrition - at first without advertising, then with much less than before. He remains the leader in the Sydney morning radio ratings.

The Jones saga, like our John Tamihere/Willie Jackson debacle, demonstrates how effective social media networks are in mobilising opposition to media content and marketing, and shaming companies into pulling their business.

Power to the people, and all that. But it doesn't always have to play out that way, as the Jones saga illustrates. His radio station, 2GB, didn't just hold up its hands in helplessness; it suspended all advertising from his show after the controversy broke, allowing itself plenty of space for backroom manoeuvring.

The station - not necessarily the show - retained 45 of its sponsors; it took control of the situation, shielded its advertisers from embarrassment and came out looking as though it had tried to do something to rein in its naughty-boy cash cow.

The responses of New Zealand media companies that find themselves in similar positions - MediaWorks for one, but also TVNZ over Paul Henry, and a few others - haven't offered quite the same display of firm hands on the tiller. First comes the bland, meaningless statement, the one that takes the tone of a shocked but secretly proud parent ("someone so gifted/so special occasionally goes too far, that's just the way he is!")

That's usually followed by the statement that appears to have been drafted by the intern ("we are still looking into the incident/bear with us") and then the inevitable conclusion, where someone's agent gets to draft a dignified exit letter when it is patently obvious that they've been shown the arse-card by the company bean counters.

All of this - the Jones fiasco but also the Willie and JT mess - show that few station managers and advertisers actually listen to the products to which their names are attached. If they did, they would have spotted the warning signs many months in advance, as egotistical loons run off at the mouth, on topics they know next-to-nothing about. If they did that, surely, being the socially-aware companies they say they are, they would have disassociated from these shows a long time ago, right?