Ad boycott boomerangs on Hong Kong bank
By Arnold Zeitlin
freedomforum.org
07.16.01
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| Hong Kong publisher Jimmy Lai in Hong Kong office at Apple Daily newspaper in November 2000.
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HONG KONG — An advertising boycott has rebounded in unflattering publicity for the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corp. Ltd., one of the world's largest banks.
Among other epithets, the bank has been termed "an unprincipled thug" for its decision to withdraw advertising from the Chinese-language media group that publishes Hong Kong's racy Apple Daily tabloid and its aggressive weekly counterpart, Next Magazine.
The bank's ire was raised by a report in Next two months ago that Vincent Cheng, a bank director, had made personal use of a company-owned car, fax machine and safe for his personal use. The bank, commonly known by its initials HSBC, dismissed the allegations as being without foundation — and then went one retaliatory step further.
"There are many publications in Hong Kong and it is up to us where we place our advertising," a bank spokesman, Gareth Hewett, was quoted as saying last month in the South China Morning Post.
Press reaction to the advertising boycott has been vigorous and unflattering. The bank has been skewered as crude, arrogant, and much worse.
"It is disappointing to discover an old and valued friend is actually an unprincipled thug who tramples on the principles you hold most dear," wrote Tim Hamlett, a journalism professor at Hong Kong Baptist University, in his column in the South China Morning Post.
The Asian Wall Street Journal suggested in an editorial that "perhaps the men running the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corp. should take an anger-management class."
The newspaper added: "The problem with this approach is that it hurts HSBC's shareholders as well as Apple. By pulling advertising from some of Hong Kong's most popular publications, the bank loses the access to potential customers, access on which it previously put a high value. Not to mention all the bad publicity for HSBC that has followed from the boycott."
Philip Bowring, a former editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review, asserted in a column in the Morning Post:
"Senior executives act … as though they were owners of enterprises who can demand feudal loyalty and boot-licking behavior from their employees and even the public.
"HSBC has every right to demand a correction and apology from Next if the facts are untrue, or the implications unwarranted. Mr. Cheng can sue for libel if he is seriously hurt.
"But for HSBC to use its commercial power against one newspaper on account of one article which has appeared in another magazine is a gross abuse of its influence," Bowring added. "It also happens to be against the interests of shareholders — I am one — to decline to use a cost-efficient media because a member of HSBC management feels personally aggrieved."
Next and Apple Daily are owned by the ever-brash media tycoon, Jimmy Lai, who late last year moved his operations from Hong Kong to Taiwan.
Lai certainly is no stranger to media controversies, given that his publications tend to tweak the powerful and to push at the margins of good taste. He and Next gained a measure of lasting renown for an article published in 1994 that termed Chinese Premier Li Peng "the son of a turtle's egg with a zero IQ," an insult which, in Chinese, has sexual connotations.
Lai also has been roundly criticized for his publication's ethical lapses, such as Apple Daily's paying a wayward husband to pose in compromising photos that the newspaper published in 1998. Lai wrote a front-page apology to help quiet the furor surrounding that misstep.
Nor is the bank a stranger to local controversies. In 1991, it decided to locate the world headquarters of the consolidated HSBC Holdings in London — a decision roundly criticized in Hong Kong, the city of its origins in the 19th century. The bank also stopped using the words "Hong Kong" in its advertisements after the territory came under Chinese sovereignty in July 1997.
For some observers in Hong Kong, the advertising boycott is a revealing example of just how sensitive even a global financial institution can be to the pinpricks of local news coverage.
The Asian Wall Street Journal in its editorial called the bank's reaction "an emotional response" that may "hurt both corporate governance and press freedom."
What's more, the newspaper said, the bank "took up the crudest weapon at hand, its advertising budget."
For its part, HSBC has been silent of late. Its spokesman said the corporation would no longer comment on the controversy.
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