MyPillow, the bedding company founded by conservative activist Mike Lindell, has long been a prominent sponsor for Fox News, its commercials comfortably woven into the fabric of the network's programming over the past decade.
But the partnership appears to have hit a wall. On Friday, Lindell announced on Stephen K. Bannon's podcast that his company's media-buying agency was told this week that the network would no longer accept MyPillow advertisements.
Lindell told the Washington Post they got no explanation for the decision, but he thinks it's connected to his hiring of former Fox host Lou Dobbs to anchor shows on his website FrankSpeech.com. Dobbs's first guest, on Monday, was former President Donald Trump.
But a person with knowledge of the situation who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment said the partnership has not been canceled but rather has been paused because Lindell has failed to pay for his ads since August.
This person added that Lindell is not banned from advertising on the network. A Fox News spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
Lindell hotly denied this assertion, saying that "of course" his company has paid for its ads. "I just checked and we paid them $4 million for ads in December alone," he said. "Your sources are false!!!! Try again!!!"
The person with knowledge of the situation said that Lindell's December payment was for ads that aired in June and July.
Lindell framed the network's current prohibition as indicative of cancel culture. "It's disgusting. I'm beside myself," he said, adding that "it should be almost illegal that you don't accept money to buy ads when you've been doing it this long." (He said that MyPillow spends $1 million to $2 million per week on Fox advertisements.)
Lindell, who spent millions trying to prove baseless conspiracy theories that the 2020 presidential election was fraudulent, continued advertising on Fox even as he heavily criticized the network for not giving as much credence to those theories as he did. (Fox last year settled a defamation suit from a voting-machine company for a staggering $787.5 million over false claims of fraud that other Trump allies promoted on its airwaves.)
Lindell said that Fox has previously declined to run advertisements for his book and for his conservative website, but "very seldom have they ever not approved the content of a commercial."
A MyPillow ad has not appeared on Fox in the month of January. The last appearance was on Dec. 18, when three MyPillow ads ran.
MyPillow was Fox's second most frequent advertiser in 2023, trailing only the supplement company Balance of Nature, according to data provided to the Post by ad tracking company iSpot.tv. The company ran approximately 6,500 ads on Fox, with an estimated value of $65.2 million, illustrating the potential significance of MyPillow's long-term absence for Fox's bottom line.
MyPillow's advertising spots were particularly vital in supporting Tucker Carlson's since-canceled Fox News show after the host lost dozens of large corporate sponsors because of his 2018 comments about immigrants. "When other companies would be afraid to advertise there or boycott them, we didn't change," Lindell said.
Emails released as part of Dominion Voting Systems' lawsuit against Fox showed the importance that the network has placed on maintaining a good relationship with Lindell, even as a producer for Sean Hannity's show described him as "nuts!" in a text message.
In a December 2020 email, Fox News head of advertising Jeffrey Collins told a colleague that the network sends Lindell gifts throughout the year, with one featuring a handwritten note from Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott. And the network took note of Lindell's criticisms, as was evident in one message discussing the possibility of Fox Corp. CEO Lachlan Murdoch directly calling him.
When Scott in December 2020 pressed her advertising chief on Lindell's claim that Fox wouldn't run his ads promoting his book, Collins said it was not rejected, but that MyPillow would need to pay Fox's price for political advertising "since the ad looked more like a Trump campaign ad than a book ad."
