UCCtruths

The United Church of Christ's Stillspeaking Ministry is set to launch a new fundraising campaign to air the "Steeples" ad (also known as "All the people"). According to literature about the campaign, the national office will only "buy as much air time as grassroots fundraising allows". The advertising campaign is targeted to run the last two weeks of September on national cable networks with additional ad buys in October if enough money is raised.

There are a couple of interesting points to be made about this new campaign. The "Steeples" ad had a run of a week a few years ago and according to the UCC, "viewer response was almost nil". The "Steeples" ad is not as edgy as the other two the UCC ran which may have contributed to the lack of response.

It is also widely believed that in the midst of the pseudo-controversy a few years ago around past television ads that had been rejected by the broadcast networks, NBC actually had approved the "Steeples" ad and claimed that it "contained a positive message asserting only that UCC churches are welcoming and inclusive". Despite the unpublicized network approval, the UCC decided not to run the ad on broadcast television at all and to trump up allegations that the networks had rejected the ads because they were "too controversial." It appears now that the UCC will not even attempt to run the "Steeples" ad on broadcast television networks at all.