TREND WATCH: What’s Happening? A host of big-name brands recently pulled their ads from YouTube amid concerns over “brand safety.” The uproar is a reflection of both the high-pressure environment brands are facing and the closer, more values-driven relationships they’re building with consumers in the digital age.
Our Take: This heightened sense of intimacy may hurt brands more than it helps them. As brands have sought to appear more like friends, they’ve given rise to higher expectations and a greater sense of betrayal when something goes wrong. While younger consumers appreciate the direct channel that they have with today’s brands, they are concerned above all with whether a product works.
In April, ad analytics firm MediaRadar revealed that YouTube lost 5% of its top U.S. and Canadian advertisers following reports that client ads were appearing next to extremist videos.
The controversy erupted after The Times of London reported that ads for prominent companies were appearing alongside videos featuring racist and hateful content, as well as fabricated news stories. The response was swift: A slew of major brands, including Johnson & Johnson, AT&T, Verizon, Walmart, Starbucks, General Motors, L’Oreal, and Coca-Cola, announced that they were pulling their advertising from YouTube. Advertising giant Havas did the same for its U.K. clients. Several of these brands also suspended spending on Google’s search ads.
The boycotts prompted a public apology from Google’s chief business officer Philipp Schindler. In his post, Schindler apologized to the aggrieved companies for violating their sense of “brand safety.”
WHAT IS BRAND SAFETY?
This term isn’t new. Advertisers have long been careful to avoid having their brands appear in obviously unfavorable contexts. Cruise lines, for example, don’t want their ads to follow a news story about a shipwreck. Preventing such unfriendly associations was a relatively simple task in the days of print media, when ad placement was easier to track.
But brand safety only became a buzzword with the advent of online advertising, which has made it difficult for companies to control—or even know—where their ads show up. Enforcing brand safety is not as simple as blacklisting certain websites known for inappropriate content or doing a keyword search.
Now, companies are citing potential damage via associations or connections that are far less direct than what previously qualified as a violation of brand safety. Damaging content doesn’t have to directly undermine a brand’s message (such as the cruise line example)—it can be any content that ad executives believe may turn off some potential customers.
The decision by brands to pull ads from YouTube has raised the eyebrows of some critics who consider the hubbub overblown. In an Advertising Age op-ed, ad industry veteran Andy Ball argued that no viewer would ever consider an ad’s inadvertent placement near offensive content an endorsement. Meanwhile, in an interview with Recode that defended Google’s response, Schindler indicated that the videos advertisers flagged represent a miniscule fraction (less than 1/1000th of a percent) of their total impressions.
DIGGING DEEPER
If the impact of “unsafe” branding is marginal (or even nonexistent) and near-impossible to detect and enforce, why have so many household names been so quick to distance themselves from YouTube?
Better safe than sorry. In part, the rush to protect their images from even implied slights stems from the enormous pressure brands feel to avoid missteps in today’s 24/7 media environment. (See: “The Perils of PR.”)
Companies are hyperaware that any blunder can result in an instant tidal wave of bad publicity—whether by way of critical news headlines or viral online memes that turn brands into a laughingstock. In the wake of the Samsung Galaxy battery scandal, one pointed meme featured a bomb-defusing expert getting ready to plug in his phone, with the caption: “How to safely charge your Galaxy Note 7.” Tesla took similar heat back in 2013 after one of its Model S vehicles was involved in a fiery crash.
Perhaps the most infamous recent examples of bad PR are Pepsi’s widely derided ad starring Kendall Jenner and the incident involving a United passenger getting dragged off a plane. In both cases, the companies were forced into damage control mode following widespread outrage on social media.
With public trust in corporations already low, many executives figure that it’s better to be overly cautious.
Get on my level. The response can also be viewed as the culmination of a longtime trend: the emergence of values-driven brands that relate to their customers on a level that’s more personal than professional.
Boomer-led companies aren’t just hawking products and services, but representing a community of patrons who share certain beliefs—in other words, “people like me.” This impression has only grown stronger as marketing messages have become increasingly personalized thanks to highly sophisticated targeting software.
As author Thomas Frank recounts in The Conquest of Cool, the association of brands with different lifestyles took off in the 1960s, when advertisers shifted away from the middle market in favor of pitching to rebels and nonconformists. The perception of intimacy exposes brands more to the idea that they are who they attract, and thus must choose the “right” crowd.
Of course, this shift occurred precisely when Boomers were coming of age. The decision by brands to abandon establishment norms and embrace the “antihero” role truly resonated with—and shaped—this rising generation, who have made it their life mission to go against the grain.
THE RISKS OF GOING PERSONAL
To be sure, appealing to customers on a more personal level has produced almost tribal levels of customer loyalty. But it’s also had the opposite effect: Brands are drawing ire for the social positions they take.
The #GrabYourWallet movement urges followers to boycott over 50 companies that sell Trump-brand products or whose executives or board members backed his campaign. Executives at L.L. Bean, New Balance, and Under Armour found themselves under fire from Trump detractors, and Starbucks from his supporters.
Steve Gaither, CEO of marketing agency JB Chicago, summed up the current climate in the Chicago Tribune: “If somebody boycotts you, 50 percent of the country is happy and the other 50 percent is upset. You can either get through it or put a flag in the ground and make that happy 50 percent be fervent about your product.”
Companies not only run higher risks of wading into “unsafe” territory, but also face fierce blowback when their attempts to relate fall flat. The lambasted Pepsi ad, for example, aimed to appeal to Millennials by featuring a social-media star amid young ralliers while invoking imagery from the Black Lives Matter movement. But what worked so well for Coca-Cola in the 1970s came off as tone-deaf today. Instead of imparting a meaningful, feel-good message, Pepsi came off as an interloper trying to steer a conversation it didn’t understand.
Nowhere is the love/hate dynamic between brands and consumers more evident than on social media, which disempowers both sides as much as it empowers them. On the one hand, sites like Facebook and Twitter have democratized the consumer experience—and brands rely on the content that users generate in order to run ads.
But as incidents like Google’s ad cleanup illustrate, social media ultimately exists to serve the brands. YouTube’s recent policy changes—most notably, requiring videos to have at least 10,000 views before they can run ads—risks angering the creators who make the content and shrinking the pool that brands need to reach consumers. Moreover, these changes likely won’t even solve the problem: Nowadays, even content that garners millions of views is bound to be offensive to some group of people (an endorsement/condemnation of Trump, for instance).
In fact, social media giants themselves are being lambasted for their role in “enabling” hateful, offensive, and misleading content. Criticized for monopolistic pricing power, invasions of privacy, Orwellian news censorship, and stonewalling national security agencies, Silicon Valley titans still insist that they are neutral hosts in a libertarian marketplace. Now comes a new issue (brand safety) that spotlights yet again their obligations to clients and users.
Earlier this month, U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May accused these platforms of abetting terrorism. And last December, the EU warned Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, and Google to speed up their efforts to curb hate speech or face consequences.
SO WHAT SHOULD BRANDS DO?
All of this leaves brands on the brink of a new dilemma: Are they better off striking a personal, intimate tone, or one that’s blander and more middle-of-the-road?
It’s a tough balance. To be sure, brands don’t have to eschew values-driven campaigns altogether in order to achieve mass appeal. Boomers and Xers might in fact prefer a “just for you” intimacy—or being approached as a unique lifestyle tribe. Moreover, Xers and Millennials want to support socially conscious businesses. They also appreciate the direct line to brands that social media has opened up for them.
But in such a hyperpartisan era, the safest and most forward-looking strategy may be to embrace anodyne marketing. It’s likely that more brands will adopt the same approach year-round that they’ve taken toward the Super Bowl (see: “All Aboard the Smile Train”): emphasizing common, feel-good values like community and citizenship. Emphasizing roots and tradition via heritage branding is another bulletproof strategy to broaden appeal. In the years and decades to come, Millennial decision makers may very well decide to steer their brands in this safe, inoffensive direction, marking a complete reversal from the type of messaging that resonated with Boomers.
Meanwhile, companies are extending olive branches to both sides of the aisle: After Starbucks caught flak for announcing it would hire 10,000 refugees, CEO Howard Schultz later vowed to hire 25,000 veterans and military spouses.
If brands do choose to keep some degree of values-based marketing, they must ensure that their messaging is at least consistent with their product. The Pepsi ad appeared opportunistic in part because the social-justice imagery was ludicrously unrelated to the firm’s mission. Note that playing it safe doesn’t preclude an engaging brand voice: Fast food brands like Wendy’s and Denny’s, for example, have largely remained apolitical but have set themselves apart with goofy, entertaining tweets.
In the end, however, it’s all about quality. Xers and Millennials are much more likely to care about the bottom-line effectiveness of a product than a company’s value imagery or whether it fits their “tribe.” They just want to know if it works. Brands that help people don’t necessarily make a point out of their community impact; they just help.
Values-oriented messaging is useful only to the extent it can increase identification with an already well-received product—suggesting that brands might be able to relax a bit when it comes to messaging and focus instead on providing superior service.
