NRA Accuses Its Ad Agency of Fraud

The National Rifle Association claimed in a court filing last week that its longtime advertising partner, Ackerman McQueen, used a recent foray into digital-content production to defraud it of millions of dollars while simultaneously diluting its storied brand by advancing “racist’ and “dystopian” cultural commentary.

The National Review reports the complaint was filed as part of the NRA’s ongoing lawsuit against Ackerman McQueen (AMc), an Oklahoma City–based ad agency that has counted the NRA as its largest client for more than 30 years. It was this trust, built up over more than three decades of cooperation, that led NRA leadership to give AMc the rope it ultimately used to hang the brand by “stray[ing] from the Second Amendment to themes which some NRA leaders found distasteful and racist,” according to the NRA’s complaint.

If the NRA’s attorneys are to be believed, AMc squandered both the organization’s brand capital and much of its financial capital in the space of little more than two years.

In 2016, AMc executives convinced their NRA counterparts that digital-content production was the wave of the future, prompting CEO Wayne LaPierre to dramatically expand NRA News, which had focused almost exclusively on Second Amendment commentary, into NRATV, a digital-streaming platform featuring commentary on a wide variety of cultural and political issues. Later, over the course of 13 private meetings and phone calls, AMc’s C-suite defended its pivot into digital media — which had clearly been an “abject failure,” according to the NRA — by citing misleading web-traffic metrics and inflated ad-revenue numbers.

AMc, in its quest to justify NRATV’s cannibalization of much of the NRA’s overall advertising budget, chose to conceal the number of “unique” engagements with NRATV’s content, depriving NRA executives of a key metric that is heavily relied upon to price advertisements and determine the overall value of a digital-media property. The advertising agency also allegedly inflated the importance of “live” content to the NRA brand’s revenue structure because it is the most expensive type of content to produce, and therefore justified the project’s budget, which ballooned from $12 million in 2016 to more than $20 million in its final year of operation, 2018.

In an effort to bolster traffic numbers its leaders knew were insufficient, AMc increasingly came to rely on content that NRA executives found “distasteful and racist,” according to the complaint. By way of example, the complaint cites one segment in which NRATV host Dana Loesch — who, like all NRATV employees, technically worked for AMc — addresses the audience as an image of the children’s television character Thomas the Tank Engine appears on the screen wearing a Ku Klux Klan hood.