Tired of being shocked
Imagine this… 15 years ago (2010), someone tells you that in the year 2025, Kanye West will spend $8million on a Super Bowl ad that will drive his fans to a page selling $200 pro-Nazi shirt (it’s been taken down but I wouldn’t be linking anyway, for obvious reasons). I bet you’d be shocked and appalled. Not only because of the Nazi advocacy but because oh my god, 15 sec ad spots are going for $8million?! 2010 was a very different time. Back then, ad spots were less than $3million and Kanye West was still a relatively normal figure (he had just had his VMA moment with Taylor Swift and was on the comeback).
Kanye has made a career out of doing and saying some incredibly outrageous and often insulting things, but his latest Super Bowl controversy takes the metaphorical cake. Looking at this purely from a marketing perspective, the play is simple… do something surprising, get people angry, drive attention. And attention he got, all the bad kinds. Not surprisingly, this caused widespread condemnation and fallout for Kanye. Evidently, before the product page was pulled, they had sold about $2million worth of shirts, meaning this was fiscally a huge loser. There’s no way Kanye didn’t expect backlash and I can only assume he didn’t expect to sell a lot of these overpriced, bigoted shirts. So the rationale and strategy aren’t as straightforward as the actual execution. I won’t attempt to figure out Kanye’s thinking. That’s the thing with Kanye, he’s going to give you unexpected and trying to understand what he’s doing is a fool’s errand.
But this did have me rethinking my perspective on shock marketing. I’ve always been a fan (for most, not all) of how brands use controversial topics to make a moment happen and get people buzzing. But lately, it’s feeling like it has jumped the shark (a la Fonzi on Happy Days)? Shock marketing, being controversial for controversial sake. Doing and saying things that are designed to get people angry and talking and not really going any deeper than surface-level. There isn’t really a smarter, more contextual meaning.
We’re seeing, over the past few years, attention being grabbed with see-through-shocking actions and statements being pushed to their inevitable limits. It’s almost as if shock & awe has been pushed so far and is being used so often that some of the craziest things being said and done are being missed or feel normal (this might also have something to do with our current state of politics, but that’s another bag).
Long gone are the days of folks getting (justifiably) incensed by Kendall Jenner solving racial injustice with a can of Pepsi. An insensitive, naive message in the midst of cultural tumult, but by today’s standards, seems pretty innocent and unintentionally misguided. Today, people are using Nazi symbology and gestures to breakthrough the noise. It’s gone too far already and we should be worried that we haven’t yet even reached the potential limit. People have always loved pushing the boundaries and reaching the edge of what’s “okay” but we’ve fallen of the edge and rolling our way to the bottom of the pit.
So, what do we do about it? As a marketer, or I guess, more as a human that wants to not constantly be inundated with the worst, most disingenuous, most offensive takes, I think we have to pull in the reins. People will always push limits for attention, but we need more and stricter guardrails to ensure people cannot push too far and that we live in a world where someone doesn’t have to praise Hitler to get their fans to care. Some thoughts…
Instating mandatory standards of content regulation on social media and digital platforms, and actually holding platform owners responsible and accountable for what’s being created, shared, and amplified in their spaces
Actively limiting amplification and attention (and therefore financial incentive) to certain topics, acts and creators or even fining / holding financially responsible certain users (per stated platform usage guidelines / code of conducts)
More proactive, universal, widespread and objective (possibly third-party audited and maintained) fact-checking and contextualizing to more quickly, effectively, and comprehensively, catch and remove harmful content
Increasing the ethical standards and exceptions by ad and media agencies of what gets to see daylight and giving gate-keepers more responsibility and ownership to maintain integrity of these advertising environments
Highlighting more positive content. In an ideal world, we as consumers would engage more with good, healthy stories more than the stuff that scares us or riles us up, but we unfortunately do not live in that world. Not sure if we can immediately change the way our brains emotionally respond to positive and scary content BUT we can change the algorithms while we let evolution do its thing
Brands, products, media and influencers thrive off of shock and outrage. This isn’t new but it’s also not sustainable at this temperature. We should be proactively acting today rather than reacting to something irreversible tomorrow.
