this is violence

If you’ve ever seen Sarah Silverman’s Jesus is Magic, you’ve seen her sing “Jewish people driving German cars” which she describes as “the opposite of FUBU.” It came to mind this weekend after this article made it’s way to me via several different people I follow on Twitter. It’s good, if not standard fare: Paul Krugman correctly bemoaning the state of the America, in this case the financial institutions that have crushed our economy. It could have been any one of the probably hundreds of articles of like this that will make their way to my desk this year. The funny thing is, when it’s not Krugman articles, it’s links to new ideas or strategies for helping these same institutions, or their corporate ilk, in how to more effectively sell their wares. Or articles showcasing the winners of awards for doing it the best. And I’m not special. We, as an industry, seem to spend equal time working for and critiquing the same institutions.

Thinking about this finally motivated me to write down something I’ve been kicking around for a while, namely what is our role, our responsibly, or our right in determining what brands deserve a voice?

Not surprisingly, a number of the people posting that Krugman article had the green tinted avatar showing their support for the Iranian democracy protesters. I was reminded of this article from Wired about customers boycotting Nokia over their alleged supplying the Iranian government with the surveillance systems now being used to stifle dissent and protests. Nokia denies they supplied anything out of the ordinary, but the story is one of hundreds, maybe thousands where major corporations, our clients, get caught doing the exact things many of us decry in our personal lives. Another example: flipping through the latest issue of Good, I found an ad for a cell carrier called Credo asking me pointedly if I care about polar bears. It is a commonly known fact that I care about polar bears a great deal so finding out that Credo donates mad cash to the polar bear cause while AT&T, the people that make my iPhone “work”, contributed the maximum amount possible to the Bush/Cheney campaign, left me feeling like I had betrayed my ursine brethren.

As just one guy, it’s pretty easy for me take the view that it makes little difference who I choose for my cell carrier. But here is the real dilemma for me, and I think for any one who works in any capacity in the marketing/advertising/branding industry: my voice isn’t the same as everyone else’s. I’m not just one guy. I make my living by being better at communication than average people and by helping brands get people to buy their shit. I try to do this by working with my clients to create experiences that don’t pollute the lives their customers, but ultimately, regardless of the quality of the thing I make, I’m still helping that company to succeed. I may not be drowning the preverbal polar bear, but I’m surely helping to pull the iceberg out from under him.

But this disproportionate amount of power swings both ways: What if, one day, we all decided that we wouldn’t work with a certain brand? Without any capacity to effectively talk to the public, that brand would cease to exist. This topic seemed to me too important to have not been written about ad nauseam, but while Googling the phrase “ethics in advertising” brings up plenty of discussion on the topics of how we work: “is it okay to lie in advertising” or “is it okay to use sex to sell a product”, I couldn’t find anything on the ethics of choosing who we work for. Admittedly, my search was cursory, but that this isn’t a top line topic seems a little terrifying to me. We spend millions of words and gallons of coffee on the minutia of “ROI for Social Media” but how often to we ask “Does this company even deserve a voice?”

For a community that fancies itself progressive, worldly, and humane, we seem strangely mute on this topic, willing to subscribe to the same relativism we find so off putting in our governments. Who are we to say who lives and who dies? But who is anyone? “Why not us?” might be a better question. I can’t help but feel like the Spiderman Rule is in play here: we have this power, this power to make and break brands of any shape or size; don’t we also have this responsibly to do it?