work show’s premiere, slated for tonight. Marketers with the network paid at least $30,000 for the ads, money which was returned by BBB.
“We tried to accommodate them,” Dawson said. “We asked them to send other art that we could use, but they said they wouldn’t be able to produce anything within such a short window of time, so we decided to refund their money.
“Essentially, they got two free weeks of advertising.”
The CW is a new network formed in 2006 following the merger of the faltering UPN and The WB networks. It is jointly owned by UPN and The WB’s former parents, CBS Corp. and Warner Bros. Entertainment, respectively.
“Top Model,” the brainchild of Banks, a former Victoria Secret model, is now in its eighth season.
A spokesman for the CW said that the ads being pulled was not significant.
Riders didn’t seem to think so either. Vicki Bennett, who rides the BBB to UCLA where she is studying psychology, said she never paid much attention to the ads and didn’t think they were offensive at all.
“It’s just some ladies in bikinis,” Bennett said on Tuesday. “I don’t see anything wrong with that. You see that every day on the beach or in a catalogue.
“I can see some people might have a problem with it because of all the talk about anorexic models and poor body image,” Bennett continued. “But this is a show by Tyra Banks, who has come out against the industry for encouraging models to be thinner and thinner.”
The modeling industry has come under fire in recent months for its ultra-thin models, with some countries banning bony beauties from the catwalk. The measure was partly in response to the death of 22 year-old model Luisel Ramos, who had a heart attack after living off green tea leaves and Diet Coke for the last three months of her life.
This isn’t the first time BBB has pulled ads because of complaints from the public. In recent years, City Hall nixed spots hyping the series “Nip/Tuck” and the feature film “Ten Things I Hate About You.”
In the case of “Nip/Tuck,” a racy, superficial drama on the FX Network that follows two plastic surgeons in Miami, BBB received complaints about an ad thought to be too graphic and offensive, depicting a scalpel slicing open a woman’s body, Dawson said.
As for “Ten Things,” Dawson said too many people thought the ad was something BBB had posted. Big Blue sells ad space on the sides, front and back of buses, as well as on the inside to help offset costs. On average, BBB takes in about $1.6 million a year from advertising.
“What we make goes right back into operations,” Dawson said. “That helps pay for some of the services that people would have to pay for at the fairbox.”
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on February 28, 2007. Read the original PDF.