Steve Bannon, ousted chief White House strategist to President Donald Trump, is the chairman of Brietbart. Credit:AP Breitbart News Network is a 10-year old website of which former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon is the executive chairman. It supports Donald Trump and is considered ultra-conservative. Sleeping Giants calls it "inflammatory" and accuses Breitbart of spreading and normalising hate speech. "The members of the Sleeping Giants network all work anonymously, we interact via social media and adhere to the common goal to stop racist, sexist, bigotry and hate speech in the media by stopping its ad dollars," Sleeping Giants Oz said. "We rely on the vigilance and dedication of our followers to bring ad placements to the attention of advertisers." The original account was set up in late 2016 and has 109,000 followers on Twitter and 34,200 on Facebook. Globally the group has less than 200,000 followers and the Sleeping Giants Australia account has just 501 followers since setting up in August. Its members are anonymous and would only respond to questions from Fairfax Media by email.

Sleeping Giants targeted Bill O'Reilly and his show the O'Reilly Factor. Credit:AP So far 2,760 businesses have agreed to block Breitbart from their advertising buy, but Sleeping Giants believes the news site can survive on wealthy patrons. While Sleeping Giants can't quantify their impact, their campaigns do have real-world consequences. Australian businesses such as TPG, Medibank, Optus, Bupa, Bendigo Bank and Domain Group (owned by Fairfax Media) have already been alerted and agreed to remove their ads. "We do not support the placement of our advertising alongside harmful or inappropriate material," an Optus spokeswoman said. "We removed our advertising from this site following feedback from some of our customers."

We rely on the vigilance and dedication of our followers to bring ad placements to the attention of advertisers. Sleeping Giants Oz A Bendigo Bank spokeswoman said its ad placements and media buying needs to "suit the markets we intend to reach". "In the few instances where our advertising does appear on sites where the content is deemed hateful, racist, violent or generally disrespectful to people in our community, we will take action to remove the advertising." A bigger impact has been on the Murdoch-family-owned 21st Century Fox's attempt to take over British subscription broadcaster BSkyB. The £11.7 billion ($19.6 billion) bid may fail partly because of a Sleeping Giants campaign against US-talk show host Bill O'Reilly.

Sleeping Giants targeted companies advertising on the O'Reilly Factor after the New York Times earlier this year revealed several sexual harassment allegations against him and Fox's tendency towards confidential settlements. "This is going to be a much shorter campaign (hopefully)," Sleeping Giants told followers. "Because this is not about programmatic advertising online, we're thinking we can get our point across in two to three weeks." Indeed, within weeks dozens of advertisers pulled ads from the show and Fox News Network sacked O'Reilly. However, the fact O'Reilly was not sacked until advertising dollars dried up raised concerns inside the British media regulator, Ofcom, during its review of whether 21st Century Fox would be a "fit and proper" owner of British company BSkyB. "It appears to us likely that bad publicity and the associated fall-off of advertising was a major factor behind the company's response to the allegations against Mr O'Reilly," Ofcom's report noted.

"We do not accept Fox's assertion...that there was no commercial pressure because advertising was moving to other Fox programs." Britain's Culture Secretary Karen Bradley is expected to announce the government's final decision on Fox's takeover soon. Meanwhile, advertising agencies and their clients are increasingly being asked to evaluate if they want to be associated with certain opinions. And Australian broadcasters are not immune. "The Australian [Sleeping Giants] team is looking closely at hate speech being normalised in mainstream print publications, television and cable in the Australian market and have plans afoot to bring these to the attention of advertisers," a local representative told Fairfax Media.

Or as the Sleeping Giants' anonymous founder told The New York Times: "It's scary to say it, but maybe companies will have to be the standard-bearers for morals right now". He also denied the movement restricts opinions. "Hate speech is different than free speech. If you're targeting a certain group of people on purpose and aiming your readership at them, that's hate speech. It's pretty simple, " he told the left-leaning news site Mother Jones earlier this year. The person behind Sleeping Giants in Australia likened advertising spending to political donations. However, political donations are usually made by companies that don't sell stuff directly to consumers, but do have a strong interest in certain regulatory changes. Consumer psychologist Adam Ferrier from Thinkerbell agency says brands get high levels of control over where their ads appear in today's fragmented media and can be more choosy. However, they also have to deal with an outrage culture.

"You never quite know what is going to be the next outrage and what's going to upset a small group of people and then turns into a story in the mainstream media," Mr Ferrier said. He recommends brands develop a strong identity and know who their potential customers are, then use that information to curate the context in which their brand appears. The problems associated with Google's programmatic online advertising were highlighted in March this year when advertisers were alerted to the fact their ads were appearing next to extremist videos on YouTube. In some cases government ads were appearing next to videos by terrorist groups. Google and Facebook have both been targeted by activist shareholders wanting them to take more responsibility for the spread of fake news on their sites.

Media-buying agencies reassured Fairfax Media they had tight controls in place and Google promised tighter controls to detect "questionable content". "We know advertisers don't want their ads next to content that doesn't align with their values," Google's chief business officer Phillip Schindler wrote in March. "So, starting today, we're taking a tougher stance on hateful, offensive and derogatory content. This includes removing ads more effectively from content that is attacking or harassing people based on their race, religion, gender or similar categories." Despite these promises, Sleeping Giants continues to find ads from companies which thought they had safeguards in place.