Don’t follow conversation leaders

On Innocent, Walkers, the IPA, social media, the New York Times, cancel culture, and conversation as an alternative to war.

Hello again. For anyone new here, I’m a writer of poetry, downbeat diaries, branding and advertising projects, articles for Creative Review and The Guardian, and books about design. Thoughts on Writing uses language as a way into wider cultural and political issues. My last post on Theranos attracted some smart comments from differing viewpoints—worth checking out.

In this post I plan to write about conversations: particularly the kind of conversations that brands like to lead, change, drive and invite us to join.

I want to relate it to the broader question of why conversations go off the rails these days, often warped by the commercial incentives of the same companies who urge us to join them. And at the risk of over-stretching, I want to link it to present events—because, when conversation breaks down, the eventual alternative is war.

Before I dive in, a quick plug for an actual conversation I had recently, on the Call To Action podcast. It includes a section on Purpose, starting at 27 minutes in, where I attempt to make the case in three bullet points—it takes a while but I do get through them eventually.

1. Innocent found guilty

Here’s the first story that got me thinking about all this.

Innocent—the fabled maker of smoothies, now majority-owned by Coca-Cola—recently found itself on the wrong end of an Advertising Standards Authority ruling concerning a TV ad it ran last year.

Created by Mother London, the ad (pictured above) featured a man and his otter friend stuck in a boat hijacked by revellers, who are obliviously celebrating as they head towards a large waterfall. The revellers sing about ‘messing up the planet’ until they find themselves teetering over the edge of the waterfall. Having seen the error of their ways, they gratefully follow the otter to safety, clear up the rubbish, and start turning nearby fruit into smoothies, which they consume while ‘fixing up the planet’.

You can read the full ruling here.

What I find fascinating is that, from the perspective of Innocent, the ruling must be genuinely surprising. The ASA notes how Innocent submitted a defence describing itself as a purpose-led brand, a certified B Corp, committed to being carbon-neutral by 2030—all the best-in-class indicators of a proper purposeful brand. Innocent argues that the ad was issuing a ‘call to action’ to consumers not to harm the planet. In its response to the ruling, Innocent adds: “We’d like to work with the ASA and other brands to understand how to align to them to continue the conversation on these important topics.”

As I say, the bemusement seems genuine. How can it be wrong to include positive environmental messages in an ad? Surely it’s good to ‘continue the conversation’? Surely it will be understood as a call to action to everyone to do more, and to choose a responsible brand of smoothie if they’re going to choose one at all? There ought to be no contradiction in selling smoothies while promoting social good. This is precisely the win-win world view of purpose: this idea that you can ‘do well by doing good’. If Innocent is guilty, then isn’t everyone?

I imagine the ASA felt the full weight of these arguments, especially coming from the kind of powerful corporate sources on which it relies for funding. But it remained admirably implacable, ruling that Innocent had implied that buying its product was, in itself, a way of helping the environment. And it isn’t. To point that out, plainly and precisely, feels heretical in the age of purpose.

But in the humdrum world of legality and language meaning real things, it shouldn’t be that surprising. A call to action is not the same as action. And levels of greenhouse gases don’t respond to people continuing a conversation. Yet so often these are the solutions favoured by purposeful brands. Why is that?

2. It’s good to talk

Well, one answer is that conversations are good for brands. They show up well in the metrics that are used to measure the success of ad campaigns: clicks, likes and shares. The more people join the conversation, the more people are engaged in your brand world. And that ambient brand awareness is what ultimately drives sales. (Of course, this only works if people actually join the conversation, but we’ll come back to that.)

They’re also a form of borrowed interest—pick a social topic of broader interest and find a way to attach your brand to it. Every time that topic comes up in future, the association will hopefully be reinforced. You might add borrowed integrity too—if your brand is attached to a larger cause that people support, it might benefit from a subtle halo effect.

Conversations are useful in another way: they push the focus away from the business towards the consumer, all while using the language of inclusivity and empowerment. Enough about us (and the particular impact of our business practices)—what about you? What action are you taking? How much are you worrying about climate change today? Shouldn’t you be more worried? And shouldn’t we talk about your body shape, your period, your maternal mental health, your race, your toxic masculinity? We are the conversation leaders and we want to amplify your voice. But whatever you do, don’t tell us you’re fine.

3. We need you not to be fine

Before I continue with this point, let me say there is a valid mental health message at the heart of this Walker’s Comic Relief campaign. There are many situations in which it is healthy and useful to dig past ‘I’m fine’ to talk about deeper feelings. I am in favour of big companies like Walker’s making large donations to fund well-informed mental health work.

But look what happens when the commercial partner ‘leads’ that conversation. It changes what the conversation is. There is a difference between a mental health charity telling us to stop saying we’re fine, and a snack company doing it. And that difference plays out at many levels. Look, for example, at the surreal succession of reply messages on the Walker’s Twitter timeline.

Like any brand’s timeline, it consists mainly of customers complaining about service—these are the conversations customers want to have. In the case of Walker’s, it’s usually gripes about green crisps, a bag with a hole in it, or not doing Beef and Onion flavour. (Incidentally, I believe Walker’s should do Pickled Onion Quavers—they are sitting on a goldmine.)

But how weird is it to intersperse those replies with reflections on mental health, with Walker’s cast in the role of conversation leader, telling us what is ‘important’ and what is ‘OK’? We’ve become inured to this idea that brands can speak with authority on any subject. It used to be that businesses funded charitable endeavours, but usually with a sense of distance and decorum. When you do something charitable, you don’t shout about it. And if you use it to sell stuff, for example by connecting the charitable theme directly to your logo, then it starts to seem less altruistic and more self-interested.

But the win-win world view of Purpose tells us that self-interest is fine. This is the irony of the movement. Opponents of Purpose are cast as rapacious capitalists who want to return to the Gordon Gekko days of Greed is good. But Purpose is the true inheritor of Greed is good. It has subtly changed the wording to Do well by doing good, but the logic is the same. “The faster we can grow, the more we can do in the world, so it’s a virtuous cycle,” says Sunny Jain, president of Unilever’s beauty and personal care division. The quote comes from a Financial Times article about Unilever selling skin-lightening products to generations of women in India. Some conversations are more delicate than others.

4. Conversations and viewpoint diversity

There was another industry story that got me thinking about all this. It involves the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising—hosts of the IPA Effectiveness Awards, and backers of the Danone research that I covered last year.

Since 1980, the Effectiveness Awards have been an unusual part of the awards landscape, in that they require entrants to submit hard evidence of commercial effectiveness. I’m sceptical of the extent to which it’s possible to do that—there are so many variables that go into the fluctuating fortunes of a business that it’s hard to isolate any ad campaign as causal. Nevertheless, the IPA has represented a bastion of objectivity in an otherwise subjective creative world.

But that leaves it in a tricky position in the age of purpose, when focusing on ROI seems insufficiently inspiring. What about continuing conversations, leading movements, and making the world a better place? (The issue is even more pressing when you consider that GroupM, who direct 30% of the world’s ad spend, have announced purpose will be ‘baked into’ their entire operation—if you follow the link, note the emphasis on having ‘the right conversations’ in the comments from the Chief Executive.)

It seems the response of the IPA has been to embrace the well-meaning fudge at the heart of purpose. The Danone research was one indicator, notable for the slanted way in which it was framed. Now the IPA has tweaked its judging criteria to accommodate more purpose-led work. Rather than being tied to financial returns, there is some softer language around ‘value creation’—which presumably might take the form of raising valuable awareness around a cause, or starting a valuable conversation, or generally giving the judges a warm feeling that something valuable is going on. Yes, entrants still have to present evidence of this value creation, but it’s not unreasonable to suspect this evidence might take a vaguer form than sales, footfall or donations.

Steve Harrison wrote a typically clear and caustic piece for Campaign, persuasively arguing that this represents a dilution of the link between creativity and effectiveness. What interested me was the tone of the response from the IPA, which offered unconvincing arguments couched in utter certainty of its own moral rectitude. Harjot Singh, convenor of judges for the 2022 awards, sets out his argument as though writing for the ages: “Now more than ever we find ourselves in a moment where it is becoming harder and harder to discern what is true from what is presented as truth.”

It’s not enough these days to present a counter-argument and allow readers to work out the merits of the case. Instead, there must be a claim to the One Truth. Criticism has become fake news, leading readers towards the perilous waterfall of ‘misconceptions’ that must be ‘corrected’.

I use the IPA example as a way to make a larger point: that many in the advertising world have such a narrow view of ‘truth’ that conversation itself becomes a problem. Conversations involve more than one viewpoint, so how can both be on ‘the right side of history’?

I sensed some of this in Peter Field’s response to the questioning of his IPA/Danone research, including the characterisation of criticism as hatred and a fatwah—words he used while labelling critics hysterical. This doesn’t seem like a functional way to have conversations. But to some extent I can understand the defensiveness—I’m sure there are cases where purpose critics do go too far and Twitter exchanges become excessively tribal. Online conversations often generate more heat than light.

Once again, it’s worth asking: why is that?

5. #JoinTheConversation

Here’s an observation you may have heard before: social media has messed up our conversations. To scroll through Twitter is to see a parade of conversations going wildly out of control: start with an observation, continue with someone wilfully misinterpreting it, add in some what-about-this tangents, escalate to a blue-tick pointedly quote-tweeting the exchange, stir in some bots, wait for the algorithm to make it a trending topic (with a po-faced commentary saying ‘People are discussing…’ while herding people towards the dumpster fire), then expand out into retrospective threads and thought-pieces and argue about those until the next thing comes along.

Who is it all serving?

Well, some tweeters do well out of it. If you’re psychologically cut out for the rough and tumble, and if you’re happy to tweet strong views that score high on drama and low on nuance, then you can be a successful contributor to political and societal conversations. But if you’re a little ambivalent, inclined to be charitable to people with whom you disagree, more interested in finding common ground than amplifying differences, and have a low tolerance for shoutiness and aggravation, then you’ll probably be like 75% of Twitter users: occasionally chipping in, biting your tongue on most of the important issues because it’s not worth the hassle, and following the mayhem from a distance with a mixture of guilty fascination and (more often) sickened dismay.

But who is it all really serving? Why does Twitter incentivise strong views, boost already dysfunctional conversations, award arbitrary blue ticks to the already privileged, and amplify minor differences into perpetual warfare? Again, I’m not making an original observation here, but it’s all about engagement isn’t it? Keeping us glued to the drama for as long as possible, because that creates more time and opportunity to push the ads that fund the whole enterprise. And who pays for the ads? The same brands that keep asking us to join the conversation.

These are commonplace observations about social media, but the totality of this circular dynamic strikes me as under-appreciated. The platforms where useful conversations could potentially take place are warped in service of advertisers who urge us to rejoin the same conversations, all while interrupting them with promoted content and straining to associate their brands with topics that long pre-date their involvement and are far more important than the brands themselves.

Michael Heseltine described Boris Johnson as “a man who waits to see which way the crowd is running, then dashes in front and says ‘follow me’”. He could have been describing brands and the way they ‘lead’ conversations. In the same way that brands take ‘ownership’ of a colour, they now aim to ‘own’ a conversation. Think women’s mental health, think Malteser’s. Think body image, think Dove. Think kindness, think Cadbury’s. But really think about those issues and what do they have in common? What have been the biggest threats to mental health, body image and kindness over the last decade? Hello Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

6. Conversations and ‘consequences’

One more industry story got me thinking about this: the culture war skirmish around the new ad campaign for the New York Times. The poster above sparked the controversy—and part of the problem is that it’s one screen from a digital site that is itself part of a larger campaign.

The full campaign, titled Independent journalism for an independent life, features subscribers juxtaposed with headlines from New York Times stories, forming a portrait of each reader’s perspective and interests. In the case of Lianna, the phrase ‘Lianna is’ is followed by a patchwork of headlines, often with a deliberately nonsensical effect: Lianna is A Week in Crossword Land, for example.

It happens that the JK Rowling line (presumably taken from this story) reads as a literal descriptor of what Lianna is doing. And in isolation, Lianna is Imagining Harry Potter Without Its Creator, complete with NYT branding, reads like Lianna is doing something of which the NYT approves, to the point where it is celebrating that sentiment in its advertising campaign.

I’ve noticed a lot of advertising controversies share this problem—agencies and clients think in campaigns, but the public consumes them in fragments, not least when ads are plucked from their context and shared online. It should be part of the agency’s job to analyse every screen, image and line to see how it comes across if it’s the first or only element you ever see.

But given the scale and importance of the campaign, my guess is they did think about it and decided it wasn’t a problem. After all, the campaign is meant to be about a diversity of perspectives, and this happens to reflect Lianna’s perspective—so what? Plus, it’s a perspective the New York Times assumes will play well with the younger, progressive readership that it hopes to cultivate.

The trouble is, it’s far from a universal perspective, and there are no balancing views from elsewhere on the political spectrum in the campaign. More troublingly, it’s the only line to reference a specific, living person—and that person happens to be a writer whose ‘independent’ mind has placed her at the centre of a perilously heated controversy. What does it signal to be simultaneously referenced and erased in order to sell a brand that has claimed the mantle of ‘truth’ in recent years?

The campaign stands in contrast to a recent editorial from the New York Times, in which it (surprisingly) comes out against ‘cancel culture’ and presents survey evidence suggesting most Americans, of all backgrounds, agree. The editorial makes the case for setting the bounds of free speech more widely and extending more charity to those with whom we might disagree—a sentiment hard to square with the casual erasure of JK Rowling.

Deniers of cancel culture argue that free speech doesn’t mean freedom from ‘consequences’—and this, they say, is all that is happening in the case of JK Rowling. She is free to say what she likes, but she is also free to face the consequences, which may involve being treated as a non-person by everyone from the cast of Harry Potter to the New York Times. But the trouble with ‘consequences’ is it implies some deterministic, mechanical domino effect that kicks in when certain words exit your mouth. What it disguises is that all these ‘consequences’ are the result of choices—and these are the exact choices that the phrase ‘cancel culture’ is highlighting as harsh and counter-productive. And if the riposte is that millionaire JK Rowling has hardly been cancelled, that’s to miss the real target of all this—the millions of less powerful people who watch the treatment of JKR and decide to keep quiet themselves. Productive conversations don’t happen that way—and sustainable progress relies on productive conversations.

One irony worth noting: the agency behind the New York Times campaign was Accenture Interactive. Around the same time, they featured in another controversy, in which Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase, omitted to credit them for their role in the Super Bowl QR code ad, claiming instead that ‘No ad agency would have done this ad’. Many in the ad industry rightly rallied to the defence of ad agencies (a defence that centred entirely on creativity with no mention of purpose). In the middle of the Twitter storm, I wonder if Accenture Interactive paused to reflect on how it feels to be erased as a creator.

7. Conversation > War

It took me some time to write this post, because a war broke out when I was halfway through the first draft. The magnitude of the human misery makes any discussion of advertising and branding seem crass in comparison.

But in some ways, it makes the broader theme of conversation more important. Even though I said earlier than continuing a conversation won’t bring down levels of greenhouse gases, there’s a bigger sense in which conversation is the only hope for the planet. Faced with any disagreement, the time-honoured options for humanity have been to talk it through or hit the other person over the head with a rock. When conversations are scrambled by the warped incentives of social media, in the service of the brands that fund them, people lose faith in the power of conversation and start looking for alternatives.

Does that mean it’s all the fault of brands? Well no, not really—they are swimming in a sea of socio-political change and technological upheaval and following their incentives within the rules of the game, the way businesses inevitably do.

But one thing brands could do is to stop leading conversations: they are not yours to lead. And as ‘consumers’, we could be better at withholding our approval from these self-appointed conversation leaders—even when we approve of the topic being discussed. It should not be in the hands of brands and their advertisers to decide which are ‘the right conversations’ and to subtly steer them towards solutions that aren’t too hard to swallow.

We should also be mindful of the conversations brands don’t lead. Which brand wants to host the conversation about the minimum wage, or corporate tax avoidance, or a global carbon price? Which brand wants to amplify the conversation about Saudi Arabian money in Silicon Valley? Which brand wants to discuss the ad-funded model of social media and whether advertisers have any responsibility for the harms it creates?

A good heuristic for working out the most important issues facing the planet might be to look at what brands are not talking about—because if the conversation sits comfortably within the corporate framework, it’s probably not a threat to that framework.

But for now, I have monologued long enough.

Please #JoinTheConversation below!