Now Ikea has pulled advertising from GB News as more brands shun new channel

Ikea is the latest brand to shun GB News by pulling adverts from the new “anti-woke” channel.

The furniture brand said it was not aware its adverts were being used on the channel and so suspended them over concerns GB News would not match their inclusive branding.

It comes after Kopparberg embarrassed Andrew Neil and his minions yesterday by shunning the channel on Twitter and pulling adverts, leading to GB News supporters – excited to watch a new channel that doesn’t promote cancel culture – to boycott the cider. The cider brand said they wanted to review the channel’s content before deciding whether they wished to advertise on it.

Meanwhile, Dutch beer brand Grolsch and Nivea have also suspended adverts from the channel, as has the Open University and Octopus Energy.

And GB News could be affected still by more brands wishing to remove any association. Campaign group Stop Funding Hate has been campaigning for advertisers to similarly shun the channel by calling them out on Twitter. They have targeted brands including Starbucks, Weetabix, Vodafone and Facebook. But an advert break of white noise and static would not seem too amiss, given the channel’s production values we have witnesses thus far.

Let’s circle back to out flatpack kings Ikea, though. In a statement, they said: “We have safeguards in place to prevent our advertising from appearing on platforms that are not in line with our humanistic values. We are in the process of investigating how this may have occurred to ensure it won’t happen again in future, and have suspended paid display advertising in the meantime.”

Meanwhile, responding to Ikea, Neil shared a story about the company’s French arm being fined £1 million and its CEO handed a two-year suspended sentence after it spied on employees for three years.

He wrote: “IKEA has decided to boycott GB News because of our alleged values. Here are IKEA’s values — a French CEO who is a criminal with a two year suspended jail sentence for spying on staff.”

Piers Morgan, who has been linked to GB News following his departure from Good Morning Britain, also responded to Ikea and said: “Oh shut up, you pathetic virtue-signalling twerps. I’m now boycotting IKEA.”

Others were pleased by the decision:

GB News continues to rumble on as an ‘alternative’ to the mainstream by giving viewers the news British people ‘really’ want to see. Shame advertisers don’t agree.