Converse did what ?!?

An ad campaign is a strategically planned series of advertisement messages designed to promote a product, service, or brand across multiple media channels with a unified theme and goal.

The campaign is designed to achieve measurable objectives, such as increasing brand awareness, driving sales, or shaping consumer perception

Converse got well-deserved pushback on a really terrible ad, so they pulled the ad. But the important thing to understand is ads like this have so many people involved. Creative agencies, artists, directors, the companies involved, the parent companies involved, legal, there's all sorts of layers an ad like this has to get through.

For artists and professionals that work in visual media, they know exactly what they're doing. They make a living out of the choices they make playing with light and shadow, contrast and color, context and setting. Their entire career is based on being able to go thousands of layers deep in all the minute decisions about creating one image. So it is absolutely reasonable to assume that the people that created this image made conscious choices and knew exactly what they were creating. Now here's the rough part. What did they create?

Converse's logo is a five-pointed star and they created light imagery that created what looked like a Ku Klux Klan hood at the top point of the star. Why is that so relevant? Because they also used darkness to obscure the arm, holding a pair of shoes, creating the image that looks as though a pair of shoes and legs are swinging and dangling, which conjures the image of hanging or lynching.

And then beyond that, there are five pairs of shoes in a circle around as though they are watching this event. Everything in this image screams of racial injustice. Everything in this image screams of lynching. Everything of this image screams of deep roots of racism and hate towards the black community. This advertisement is absolutely unacceptable.

And people who deny what's in that imagery are like, oh, it doesn't look like those shoes are hanging, clearly an arm holding it, it is not clear, and it is obfuscated for a reason, and people who do not see that should not be trusted in their opinion. But here's the bigger, scarier question. We're seeing a lot of very questionable ads coming out right now. Are people in the room making these decisions just this blind, just this stupid, or are people in these rooms making active decisions to use rage bait as an advertising tactic? On the surface, you could use rage bait to get views, but there's a deeper analysis where some people are suggesting that corporations are using these rage bait ads as a way to artificially lower their stock value during a stock buyback. A couple quarters go by and their stock is right back where it used to because we don't stick with our anger.

Are we still mad at Pepsi for the Kylie Jenner police brutality ad? Are we still mad at Levi's for the Sidney Sweeney eugenics ad? I have a sneaking suspicion that corporate America is banking on our short memories and being able to rage bait us for views and stock manipulation. I do not want to live in a world where that is normalized, so my rage will not be forgotten.

Source: IG @acceptingunclemurphy