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As originally published by David Sable on Linkedin. Subscribe to the newsletter!

Samuel Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, (who also happens to be one of my favorite authors and philosophers) once said, “Write what you know.”

I have always taken that admonition to heart, oftentimes resisting the deep urge I feel to write about politics, social upheaval, or cultural trends—all things I am passionate about, have sharp points of view regarding and read and listen and study about insistently, but in which I lack the official credentials of “expert.” Indeed, I have no PhD in those areas, nor have I ever been a politician or social scientist (although my father was both).

Having said that, I think some of my readers might object if I didn’t admit to often touching on those subjects, and even diving into them from time to time. Yet, a crucial point to note is that I don’t opine on those topics as a political commentator or a social critic or even as cultural zeitgeister (as much as I’d like to). I write from the perspective I know and have lived—that of marketing and communications…and what doesn’t touch, intertwine or intersect those two giant, global aggregators of just about everything we know and do in our world?

Politics, social trends and movements and culture all impact our lives and are marketed and communicated to us themselves, and often together with the goods and services that commercial brands try to sell us.

There are so many examples to cite, but to keep it near and dear, just look at the marketing bandwagon hitched to COVID-19 and BLM, replete with everything from insurance to beverages and just about all in between.

And while, many made fun of our current rush to hitch advertising wagons to powerful movements (see Pepsi’s 2017 ad featuring Kendall Jenner), it wasn’t always so. Yet, historic brands like Virginia Slims, long ago, tapped into the Holy Trinity of politics, social and culture (despite the health issues), while more recently, CVS tapped into the same trinity years later and stopped selling cigarettes because of the health issues. In another interesting marketing contrast, take a look at Heineken’s “World Apart” ad, also from 2017. It’s success (or lack of success—depends on your view) may surprise you.

There are so many more examples like this, but in the interest of time and word count, I leave them to you to find and explore. What I am more interested, beyond simply the “success” or “failure” of an actual ad campaign are the “Trinity Moments” themselves. How they communicate and market their ideas, ideals and thoughts. How they influence people beyond their “energized core” and enter the mainstream, where some believe the real victory is to be found. That is, in the hearts and minds of the masses.

One can extract a fascinating marketing lesson from the events of the last few months in the U.S. It is a marketing lesson in how an event can galvanize a movement, expand its base of supporters, and then how the positive momentum—enhanced by communications—can be highjacked (think guerilla marketing) by others…watered down and diverted to the determent of one or the other.

The story begins with the tragic killing of George Floyd on May 25, 2020 by a member of the Minneapolis, Minnesota Police Force while his colleagues passively look on. It is, sadly, a scenario we have witnessed before with the ensuing protests and demands for change.

But this time was different…a perfect storm for rage and change:

• Americans had been locked down in quarantine for a number of months and were chaffing at the bit.
• An already tense atmosphere became even more charged as minority communities suffered disproportionately from the various effects of the Coronavirus Pandemic—higher infection and unemployment rates, coupled with often poor healthcare options, reiterated the vast inequality that exists between races in America.
• An already divisive and offensive national rhetoric was primed to get even uglier as a presidential election year loomed.

…and then George Floyd was killed. It wasn’t just the video or the social media. And, knee-jerk alert, it wasn’t just the out of control cops. We had seen and experienced it before. It was the sheer depravity of it, captured succinctly in the mantra: “Eight minutes and 46 seconds,” (the amount of time Derek Chauvin knelt of George Floyd’s neck, as the man cried out for his deceased mother and begged for his life—to no avail).

“Eight minutes and 46 seconds,” ignited people’s indignant imaginations. It brought Black Lives Matter to life in a way that, “hands up don’t shoot,” didn’t. The mantra united people of all color and races and religions, as it gave dimension to Black Lives Matter. We could all wrap our minds around “eight minutes and 46 seconds” and one dead man, while at the same time, many of us would never be able to understand the experience.

The streets quickly filled with protesters, many wearing masks, but unlike previous BLM events that often strayed from the point, these remained focused…until the aforementioned hijacking began.

Various groups, some organized criminals and others, self-styled anarchists or other angry people began to riot, loot and attack cops. It got ugly and the rhetoric got ugly, but most stayed focused and on mission. “Eight minutes and 46 seconds” resonated, and when you look at the support the crowds received from ordinary Americans of all types—including apolitical and otherwise disengaged ones, it was clear that Black Lives Matter had entered our national consciousness not as a slogan, but as a mission.

Brands quickly jumped in, again, often to mixed results, but those like Ben & Jerry’s, that have demonstrated a serious and ongoing track-record of support, are viewed in a different light. Realness matters here.

The movement was focused: Black Lives Matter…and then it nearly lost its message to competing agendas and political rhetoric.

To begin with, every movement with a grievance against the system jumped in—not just on the bandwagon, not just piggybacking, but frankly tried to steal the movement’s thunder.

Climate activist Greta Thunberg praised the movement and then quickly commandeered it into a green narrative. In Seattle, the Capital Hill Autonomous Zone, or CHAZ, grabbed headlines as a potential “Summer of Love” experiment before rapidly falling into ruin as violence took over. Today, it has little or nothing to do with George Floyd or the BLM movement.

Making police accountable and protecting black citizens soon became, “defund the Police,” and Spike Lee joined the conversation to bring clarity back to the message.

Toppling statues and memorials of Confederate generals and other racists became a, “topple everyone,” movement that ultimately obscured the original powerful message and need for action.

And on and on…

We are in a volatile election year. The competing messages and agendas are drowning us. The vitriol and hatred are poisoning our ability to live and behave as civilized humans who want justice, equality, peace and goodness.

There is huge need to change the status quo, but if the messages are murky and the communications are cloudy, we will get nothing done. Worse, we lose the emotion, the feeling, the momentum. Listen:

“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel”—Maya Angelou

A month ago, great swaths of the world were feeling the pain of George Floyd’s family and were beginning to understand that Black Lives Matter is fundamental to our growth and healing as a nation. If we lose the intimacy of that feeling, we will lose the power of the movement and the power to effect change.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this piece, I try to write about what I know. And while there is much that I do not know, I know this much: we have been down this path before, and if we continue to lose momentum towards our goal, we will fail to achieve that which is necessary to our country’s ability to thrive.

Let us not lose the feeling. We can all help. If you care, train your focus on the goal. Let’s not get sidetracked by other causes and issues (worthy or not or by politics). Let’s hold ourselves and our companies accountable for real action, and not just wagon hitching.

What do you think?

As originally published by Denise Lee Yohn on Forbes.

The combined trials of the Covid-19 pandemic and protests over the racial divide are testing leaders. These crises are revealing those leaders who manage to rise to the challenge and those who are falling short of their responsibilities. Now is the time to examine your leadership style and strategy and develop the new skills and approaches you need to provide the vision, direction, and inspiration your people need now. Great brands actually thrive amidst challenge and change, so they provide excellent models of leadership that you can adapt to hone your leadership style and strategy.

In difficult times, many leaders and companies tend to retreat, hunker down, and avoid taking on risk. Whether trying to navigate through crises while leading an enterprise, managing a team, or even finding a new job, people crave certainty and stability so they return to the familiar and proven, or take their cues from those around them and follow what everyone else is doing.

But great brands assume a more proactive, progressive posture. They look for ways to think and act differently, so that they move themselves and their world forward. You should look to great brands to learn how to differentiate yourself and stand apart as a leader.

Great brands ignore convention and innovate. In the throes of the 2008 financial crisis, Hyundai introduced an unprecedented program, Hyundai Assurance. Through the program, the car maker offered buyers the option of returning their vehicle if they lost their jobs within a year. It was a bold and risky idea, but it got to the heart of consumers’ fears and broke through all the noise and distractions that other car companies were fighting. Hyundai ended up benefitting from not only a spike in sales, but also the widespread news coverage and positive public sentiment generated by the program.

You need to take similarly bold and ingenious actions if you want to do more than simply survive the current crises.  For example, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern initiated a national goal of not just flattening the curve of coronavirus cases, as most other countries have, but eliminating the virus altogether.  This elimination strategy differed significantly from mitigation efforts, as it required an escalation of restrictions at time when other countries were looking to open up. Ardern has faced criticism and skepticism for the decision, but she has remained steadfast in her resolve to lead what she calls “our team of five million’s extraordinary commitment to beating Covid.”

As originally published by David Sable on Linkedin. Subscribe to the newsletter!

His name was Captain Charles Boycott and his last name infamously entered the English language in 1880, guaranteeing him infamy for perpetuity.

You see, the Captain enforced an equally infamous decree against poor Irish tenants of an absentee landlord. Rather than resort to violence, Charles’ subjects opted for a different route of rebellion—ostracization. Farmers refused to work the fields to bring in the harvest or took care of his house. Local businesses refused his custom. He received no mail. He became isolated.

To counter the consequences of the town’s ostracization of him, Charles brought in outsiders to harvest the crops, but the cost of protecting his new workers was more than the harvest was worth. He was, plain and simple, a persona non grata.

Soon his name was used everywhere in the global press to connote, “organized isolation,” and the notion of the modern-day Boycott was born.

As we all know, the meaning and far-reaching effects of the boycott has adopted a deeper and broader meaning since its nascency.

Wikipedia defines it as the following: “A boycott is an act of voluntary and intentional abstention from using, buying, or dealing with a person, organization, or country, as an expression of protest, usually for moral, social, political or environmental reasons. The purpose of a boycott is to inflict economic loss on the target, or to indicate a moral outrage, to try to compel the target to alter an objectionable behavior.” 

As I write this, hundreds of companies around the world have temporarily suspended their advertising on Facebook, with many signing on, officially, to an organized Boycott platform called, “Stop Hate For Profit,” that was launched just a few weeks ago by a coalition of organizations including the ADL, NAACP, National Hispanic Media Coalition, Common Sense, Color of Change, LULC and Sleeping Giants.

According to a communique from ADL there has been, “A groundswell of support to address hate, racism and misinformation on Facebook. Over 240 companies ranging from Unilever to Verizon to Hershey’s have joined Stop Hate for Profit and over 700 companies have agreed to pause Facebook advertising until the company takes bold and concrete steps to remove a wide range of hateful content from its various platforms.”

Remember, “The purpose of a boycott is to inflict some economic loss on the target, or to indicate a moral outrage, to try to compel the target to alter an objectionable behavior.”

Facebook must be panicked. Zuckerberg must be in meltdown, worrying about the future of the platform, the bad PR, his shrinking fortune, his reputation…no?

According to MarketWatch and other sources, based on reports citing transcripts of employee meetings, Zuckerberg has been quoted as saying:

“My guess is that all these advertisers will be back on the platform soon enough.” And, “We’re not gonna change our policies or approach on anything because of a threat to a small percent of our revenue, or to any percent of our revenue.”

Wait!!!

“The purpose of a boycott is to inflict some economic loss on the target, or to indicate a moral outrage, to try to compel the target to alter an objectionable behavior”

Is he not worried about all that moral rage? What about the economic loss? Clearly, he is not feeling compelled.

And here is where the story starts to fall apart and where, no doubt, Captain Charles is looking down (or up) with deep envy.

Let me be clear, I have long been troubled and have written openly about the dark side of social media. The devil’s deal we all make with it to see our friends, renew old relationships, share our pictures and posts, and occasionally rave about what we love and rant about what we hate.

Needless to say, the inordinate amount of profit being made, for some, and the almost unconscionable power that has been created is also troubling, but frankly it’s a product of our times and the world we live in.

While I salute the ADL and their partners who have taken on this Sisyphean task, my fear is that neither they nor most of us really understand the inner workings of Facebook or the cynicism of some of the corporations that have signed onto this boycott.

To begin with, there are over 8 million companies/entities advertising on Facebook, and my bet is that while you don’t know their companies names, you see their advertising…mostly direct offers…way more than you do any of the big corporations who have signed on to the Stop The Hate For Profit boycott.

And, while most of us assume that the big names must represent the big bucks, nothing could be farther from the truth on Facebook. According to CNN, “Even if all 100 of Facebook’s biggest advertisers joined in, they would account for just 6% of the company’s annual ad revenue,” and most of the 100 have not joined or committed to the boycott.

More importantly, the small and medium sized advertisers, that depend on Facebook for their very lives are not joining—and they represent the bulk of Facebooks advertising revenue.

Bottom line? It would seem that Facebook’s economic ruin is not on the horizon—a particular and important pressure point for success, according to the Boycott Bible.

What about moral outrage—the other powerful pain point—surely that is clear to all, as various news sources track the latest participants, and report with glee about the downfall of the Facebook empire?

Jack Shafer, in Politico, has presented a cogent argument entitled, “How the Facebook Boycott Could Just Make Facebook Stronger.” In it, he wonders how it could be that these companies needed a clarion call, in the early summer of 2020 to wake up to the fact that, “Facebook teems with cruel and backward content and wants that nastiness to end.”

Shafer posits that of course they all knew but that #stophatredforprofit “affords CEOs a chance to claim a higher moral standing in the publics eyes at a very, very low price.”

He continues to assert, “No large company is going to suffer economically by eliminating Facebook advertising:

1.    During a historically slow sales month

2.    Which is also happening during a recession

3.    And also coincided with the low spending period of semi-quarantine

Asking a corporation to boycott Facebook in July 2020 is a little like asking a casual drinker to observe Lent by giving up alcohol in a dry county.”

And not to be too cynical (a task in itself these days), a number of the major advertisers who have joined the movement are, themselves, often targets of boycotts. It makes you wonder about glass houses and the old adage that the best defense is a strong offense.

That got me thinking…

Where are the people in all of this? Where are the people who are often themselves boycotting these very boycotters, and who should themselves be repudiating Facebook? Where are the real users of Facebook? Where are the enraged masses that gave Captain Charles Boycott immortality, of sorts, and who are what, in fact, gave most successful, historical boycotts success?

Look at them all: Gandhi, Dr. King, Nelson Mandela and others…it was never the act of holding back advertising that made a dent—it was the people!

And here is the truth: Most don’t seem to care. Some will raise a toast to the boycotters, post about it for a few days, and then forget all about it…even as the fake news and hatred and other vile content swirls around them. Worse still, others will never even notice it at all.

The real problem is that we let the genie out of the lamp a long time ago. Investor frenzy drove Facebook’s growth, and many of us find it to be a useful, even important, utility—a way to connect, to share, to remember, and, at its best, to uncover new ideas and learn.

We call Facebook and the other social engines like them, “Tech Giants,” and not media companies, so that they’re not subject to appropriate regulation. They are technically following the law, and even hiding behind it, on occasion, in terms of free speech.

Their algorithms for detecting and eliminating hate speech are mostly useless and the hordes of people they have hired to comb through the platform cannot possibly keep up—and they are already deleting almost as many fake accounts as there are people in the world.

The dilemma then is that this boycott is not a real boycott, despite the earnestness of its organizers, in spite of the corporations who have jumped on the bandwagon, simply and powerfully because only people can boycott. And people in this boycott are nowhere to be found.

So, what are we to do?

For nearly two years, I have been writing that we were entering the worst year in our history. Fake news, incitement, hatred, all being spread by social media, have and will continue to make our environment toxic. And, tragically, the worst is yet to come.

What can we do? Clearly, someone can delete all of their social media accounts. (In full transparency, I have no plans to.) We can pressure more advertisers to join in boycotting. We can advocate for serious legislation and regulation, with teeth, and we can use the platform to better ourselves, to educate friends and family, and choose to never share or engage with the bad.

We can do all of the above or none of it. Personally, I believe in regulation and the power of the user. Don’t look for salvation from Facebook. It wasn’t created to save the world, despite its lofty origin myth.

Let me end, as I do, with a quote that I think brings it all together…listen:

“It is incumbent on the media industry to discourage the glorification of media violence. It. Is also incumbent on consumers who love America to support this effort with selective patronage campaigns to encourage media that provides uplifting content and to boycott the worst offenders, if necessary.” –Bernice King

Those of us in the advertising industry pontificate a lot about purposeful companies…that people will pay more to buy from them and will actively avoid those that aren’t. We all buy from Amazon. We all rode Uber and flew United. All have had boycotts called against them…how’d that go?

So, maybe we add a new movement name to compliment the legacy of the original Boycott.

Boycotts are about users and customers pressuring companies to change policy. Now we have a Zuck—companies that just don’t care because their utility and price are more important to us than the principal.

Nelson Mandela said that boycotts are not principals, but simply tactics to achieve the bigger goal of changing the world. We have made the boycott the principle, while companies have made the Zuck the tactic. We are losing.

What do you think?