And yet this went up. I understand it’s easy to just say “marketing teams don’t understand anything,“ but I have worked with many and they are incredibly sensitive to negative feelings/reactions. They get it wrong but they tend to air on the side of caution which means the vast majority of the time they avoid situations like this incredibly intentionally.
> they get it wrong but they tend to air on the side of caution
Then this guy [1] walks into the room and says no, be bold, who could possibly object to my life's work, and he gets his way because he's signing the cheque.
Marketing teams are constantly out of touch with the message they want to convey vs the message that gets conveyed. The creative team is usually not even talking to the other teams that would drive decisions like this - they almost exclusively are an isolated team (purposefully, like how engineers are often isolated from customers) that talks to a separate marketing team that then manages things like legal/compliance, which then bubbles up to other orgs etc.
The people creating ads are just organizationally isolated in most cases.
I worked in that world for a solid decade as a “creative” (video production) and when it comes to the big dogs, that is absolutely not true. They are incredibly top down and have to review everything. We have to pitch our ideas even when we’re in the door. They have strict brand bibles we have to adhere to. Ones that gave us free rein were the exception, not the rule.
Sometimes it was for no other reason than a bunch of people in house felt they needed to justify their existence, but regardless that’s how it was 90% of the time.
I feel like what you're saying is compatible. I'm not suggesting that things aren't top down or that you wouldn't have brand guidelines, that's actually exactly what I'm suggesting. I just mean that there is organizational isolation between creative teams and other teams, just as there is organizational isolation between engineering and other teams.
So it is unsurprising to me that a creative team might have been given brand guidelines and a goal, like "hey we want to sell this, we want people happy with this" (much more concretely, obviously) and that could lead to this sort of ad, and I think that's probably more plausible than the team going "we're going to psyop everyone into surveillance statehood".
If you ever do creative work for a company they usually hand you brand guidelines in some form or fashion. Colors, fonts, how to display their name, what you can/can’t do with their logo, etc. it’s boring.
Some companies put up “press kits” on their site for public use but it’s usually logos and just basic info/stats .
All of y'all keep saying variations of this yet the whole point is it’s the exception to the rule. The vast majority of ads aren’t controversial. That’s why it’s such a big deal when one is. It’s newsworthy and everyone has an opinion on that one ad.
The claim wasn’t ads not being controversial… the claim was that the marketers intentionally made an ad that would outrage consumers and incite them to not only not buy the product, but actively abandon already purchased product.
The justification was marketers at large corporations don’t mess up and that’s both ridiculous and provably false.
