An email exchange Among the executives of Grupo Jovem Pan, since January of this year, advertising shows the dissatisfaction of the company’s managers with the frequent decrease in income.
The messages are linked to a lawsuit Jovem Pan himself brought against sleeping giants Brasil in a Sao Paulo court. The group, created in 2020, campaigns for private organizations to stop sponsoring channels and vehicles that promote hate speech. Since last year, the movement has promoted the #DesmonetizaJovemPan campaign, to cancel the broadcaster’s sponsorship. “Last year, five people were killed when terrorists stormed the Capitol to attack the elections. Recently, Brasilia has shown that we will be hostages of a new Capitol while Jovem Pan will benefit from the speech of the coup. Help us save democracy”, the movement expressed in the campaign.
In one of the e-mails, a media supervisor who manages the Toyota carmaker’s account in Brazil requested the immediate suspension of ads already contracted to run on Jovem Pane. The reason given in the message is an internal rule that prohibits the brand from being linked to “any car that is related to scandals, be it political, discrimination, among others.” As a result, in net terms, Jovem Pan lost revenue of R$ 109,113.28.
Another carmaker also broke an advertising deal in the same month. In the email attached to the process, however, the Chinese Caoa Chery does not support the reason for canceling the four pieces, which will represent BRL 728,634.00 in Jovem Pan’s coffers.
In all, the losses on the two contracts add up to R$ 837,747.28 in one month.
The e-mails were forwarded from the commercial department to the legal department, which forwarded them to the company’s lawyers. “Look at the size of the damage”, lamented the legal director.
And stop in the way Jovem Pan’s legal department was contacted via e-mail available on the open process by the broadcaster, but no response was received till the time of publishing this report. We sent an e-mail to the people responsible for Toyota Brasil and Caoa Chery’s advertising contracts, but we also had no response.
Left/Above: Email from Toyota’s media supervisor. Right/below: Jovem PAN’s legal director laments the loss in an email.
In the process, the São Paulo broadcaster’s lawyers wrote that Jovem Pan is victimized and harassed by the Sleeping Giants Brasil movement and requests a court injunction as well as the immediate removal of all materials used in #DesmonetizaJovemPan. New law aimed at affecting company finances, removing “former, current and future sponsors”. In the legal part, there are campaign prints that claim a position from the broadcaster’s other advertisers, such as Banco Safra, Bradesco, Boticario and American. Lawyers have asked for a fine of R$ 20,000 per day if the decision is not accepted.
The Court of Justice of São Paulo, however, did not accept in the first instance the injunction proposed by the broadcaster to stop the Sleeping Giants Brasil campaign. Jovem Pan then filed an appeal for an immediate stay – which was again denied by the court.
On its website, Sleeping Giants Brazil maintains a counter it calls a “demonetizometer,” adding up all amounts resulting from advertising contracts, which will be paid to media organizations that promote misinformation, hate speech or conspiracy theories — but who go unpaid because of the movement’s efforts. gone According to activists’ calculations, in 2020, the first year of the movement, about R$ 15 million was not sent by advertisers to vehicles condemned. In 2021, about R$ 42 million – last year’s numbers have not yet been calculated.
investigated and demonetized
In addition to publicly charging any sponsors, Sleeping Giants Brasil has extrajudicially notified Google that the platform will block or disable monetization of all content produced and made available by Jovem Pan on its channels. He also asked the platform to deactivate the company’s AdSense account – an advertising service that profits from the number of clicks by users
In October 2020, surfing the coup wave of the Bolsonaro government, the station was considered a “successful case in Google News”. A report by Piawi magazine revealed that the tech giant has helped Jovem Pan with $300,000 through its journalism incentive program, the Google News Initiative.
The report also states that the president of the station, Antonio Augusto Amaral de Carvalho Filho, known as Tutinha, and Roberto Araujo, who now holds the position, even traveled to a presentation at the company’s headquarters in Palo Alto, USA. According to Piau, in addition to greater tolerance for violations of the company’s content policy, the two were able to negotiate the right to sell ads on their videos.
But in November last year, public pressure shook the partnership and Google demonetized the company’s channels. According to YouTube, the channel “Os pingos nos Is” has “repeatedly violated” the company’s policies against election misinformation and “guidelines for adequate content for advertising, including controversial topics and topics related to sensitive events, dangerous or harmful acts”. “
Sleeping Giants Brasil filed a lawsuit in January this year at the São Paulo Court of Justice demanding that Google Brazil preserve 2,390 videos published on Jovem Pan’s YouTube channel. According to them, the agency will remove broadcast content including hate speech and attacks on electronic voting machines, apart from false information about vaccines against Covid-19 and incitement to hatred. In a survey conducted by activists, the broadcaster will have already deleted 417 videos.
But this number could be higher. Robot from Novello, a data analysis company that patrols channels on the right, detected that, in January 2023, only on the channel of the “3M1” program, 3,666 thousand videos disappeared. “Jovem Pan News” lost 77 videos. In total, 5,258 videos were no longer displayed on the broadcaster’s channel. Most of the deleted videos are back live, but 1,516 remain unavailable. They were set as “private” by the channel owner – that is, they are not accessible to the public and not discoverable in search.
At the time, Jovem Pan released a statement saying it had suffered an attack on its channels, which would trigger a massive cleanup. All this comes two days after São Paulo became the target of an investigation by the federal public ministry for spreading false news against Brazil’s democracy.
A civil investigation launched by the MPF detailed a series of content at the station that incited anti-democratic acts – a process that culminated in the January 8, terrorist attack at the headquarters of the Three Powers, in Brasilia. For the agency, the broadcaster aired “numerous speeches with the potential to encourage and even incite anti-democratic acts”.
The broadcaster’s response was immediate. A day after the investigation began, Jovem Pan announced the dismissal of four commentators: Rodrigo Constantino, Joe Martinez, Paulo Figueiredo and Marco Costa. Augusto Nunes and Guilherme Fueza were fired a week before Lula’s election. Another consequence of the investigation was Tutinha’s resignation as station president.