Yahoo! Cancels Banner Ads Placed by SEIU Labor Union

By JENNIFER L. REWICK

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL INTERACTIVE EDITION

Yahoo! Inc. has pulled the plug on the Service Employees International Union's cyberpicket.

The union, currently embroiled in a dispute with AHL Services Inc., launched a $10,000 advertising campaign Jan. 14 on the portal site. On Feb. 3 union leaders received a phone call from Yahoo telling them the campaign had been canceled.

Union Takes Its Labor Dispute to Cyberspace With Yahoo! Ads (Jan. 14)

"I went on the site and the ads were gone," said Robert Masciola, research coordinator for SEIU, which represents 1.3 million janitors, municipal and health-care workers. "It came as a shock to us. They say they review everything before they run it, so we figured they would have told us they had a problem with it before the campaign ever started."

The ads were scheduled to run for three months but were pulled after only three weeks. Mr. Masciola said the union still is waiting for a written explanation from Yahoo. He said Yahoo gave two reasons over the phone for the campaign's removal: that the union had breached its contract with Yahoo by mentioning Yahoo's name in an initial press release about the campaign, and that Yahoo didn't condone targeted negative advertising.

A spokeswoman for Yahoo confirmed that the campaign was no longer running but declined to give a reason, saying that "agreements between Yahoo and its advertising clients are privileged."

AHL, based in Atlanta, is a provider of online and traditional fulfillment outsourcing and contract services. The union's disagreement with AHL is that the company won't honor a September vote by passenger-service workers at Los Angeles International Airport employed by Argenbright Security, an AHL unit, to join SEIU Local 1877. At the time, Argenbright refused to acknowledge the results, saying the vote wasn't legally binding because it wasn't conducted by the National Labor Relations Board.

Mr. Masciola said 95% of the 1,000 workers, whose job is to shepherd passengers and their carry-on luggage through the airport's security stations and into the terminals, voted for a union.

In addition to protests at LAX and AHL's Atlanta headquarters in January, the union launched the cyberpicket in the hope of attracting the attention of customers of AHL's Gage Marketing Services division, which is the company's e-commerce fulfillment unit.

Banner ads, which read, "un-fulfilled.com: click here before you engage Gage Marketing Services" appeared in a random rotation on Yahoo's news and finance pages and were expected to run 100,000 times during the three-month campaign. The banner ads also appeared atop the search-results page when users searched for key words such as "AHL Services" or "e-fulfillment." Clicking on the ad took users to a SEIU-sponsored Web site, www.un-fulfilled.com, which lists the union's complaints against the company.

The union plans to protest the ad's removal by picketing in front of Yahoo's headquarters in Santa Clara, Calif., on Tuesday. "We want the campaign reinstated," Mr. Masciola said. "We didn't think what we were doing was controversial."

Michele Slack, an analyst at market-research firm Jupiter Communications in New York, said she wasn't surprised by the removal of the campaign.

"In general, negative campaigns are not a good reflection on both the constituency involved and also the media company that's running it," she said. "You could potentially be seen as supporting the cause behind the negative campaign."

She added that "Yahoo doesn't want to alienate any advertisers or party -- today's target could be tomorrow's big spender."

Write to Jennifer L. Rewick at jennifer.rewick@wsj.com

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