Can Brands Avoid the Next ‘Kanye-In-Waiting?’

Can’t we get back to selling sneakers and talking about advertising?

The weariness from endless outrages is palpable among consumers, communications professionals and the brands themselves.

Most sane people would like to put a lid on the inflammatory tirades of Kanye West (aka Ye) and get back to business. But anti-hate groups say the marketing world can’t “just move on” because the next bilious, threatening wave of celebrity-fueled racist, sexist, xenophobic, antisemitic tabloid fodder is always just another few tweets away.

This week, NBA star and frequent political provocateur Kyrie Irving tweeted support for a film that tracks in antisemitic conspiracy theories. He proceeded to double down on his comments.

During a news conference Thursday afternoon, Irving stopped short of apologizing for the stance or even denying he holds anti-semitic beliefs. For that, the Brooklyn Nets suspended him for five games and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) said it wouldn’t accept Irving’s $500,000 donation toward causes and organizations that work to eradicate hate and intolerance. But by Thursday’s end, Irving had apologized: “To All Jewish families and Communities that are hurt and affected from my post, I am deeply sorry to have caused you pain, and I apologize,” he wrote in a statement.

Still, experience tells us it won’t end here.

This time was different

The cultural climate has become more hospitable for overt hate speech in recent years, said Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the ADL, an organization dedicated to fighting antisemitism and bigotry generally.

The latest antisemitic threat came on Thursday when the FBI’s Newark office warned of a possible attack on New Jersey synagogues. Nerves are frayed. So people are turning to the strongest voices to meet this urgent moment.

Getting brands to hold their famous representatives accountable would seem to be an obvious way to connect provocative hate speech with real-world consequences.

Greenblatt met with Adidas executives during the two weeks that the company was buffeted by mounting criticism regarding West’s actions. The episode began with the artist and entrepreneur’s promotion of White Lives Matter T-shirts at October’s Paris Fashion Week show. The matter concluded with the blow-up surrounding a since-deleted twitter threat to go “death con 3 on Jewish people.”

The ADL regularly meets with other brands to discuss prevention and responses to acts and expressions of intolerance. But few recent incidents have reached this level of intensity or put brands on such high alert.

“ADL got engaged because Kanye is one of the most well-known entertainers in the world,” Greenblatt said. “He had 31 million followers on Twitter, making him one of the most popular people on that platform. He has said a lot of things over the years that we have found highly objectionable. But when he launched into this anti-Jewish tirade again and again and again, we felt it was critical to step up because we saw a scarcity of voices doing so.”

The ADL “took note of West’s consequential corporate relationships,” Greenblatt noted. The Gap broke with him first while Adidas said publicly it was putting the relationship with West into “review’ after the White Lives shirt firestorm.

“My take was, what more did you need to review?” Greenblatt said.

Adidas’ slow walk to cutting ties with West reflects what Greenblatt said is a broad lack of understanding about how to put out the fires of hate in 2022. New methods and faster responses are required. As Greenblatt put it, this time is different.

Why focus on Kanye

“We’re operating in an environment where antisemitic incidents have reached historic levels,” Greenblatt told Adweek, noting that at the end of October, the ADL reported 1,444 antisemitic incidents in 2022. “The ADL has been tracking these kinds of activities for 45 years. Literally, last year was the highest on record since that time.

“So when someone like Kanye takes to his platform and does interviews with Chris Cuomo, Piers Morgan, appears on podcasts spouting comments like, ‘The Jews are out to get me,’ all it takes is one person to say, ‘I’m going to get them,’” Greenblatt said two days before House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband was attacked by an individual alleged to have engaged in trafficking common conspiracies against Jews and other minority groups.

The ADL sent almost 20,000 emails to Adidas within the first days after West’s Oct. 6 interview on Fox News, where he made offensive remarks about Jewish control of the media. Greenblatt held private meetings with Adidas executives as well as institutional investors with large positions in the athletic wear company.

“The campaign energized the public to put pressure on brands doing business with Kanye,” Greenblatt said. “You saw Balenciaga drop him; you saw his talent agency CAA break with him; and MRC decided to drop the documentary with him. Gap started to liquidate its inventory. And then Adidas acted. In all honesty, it should have happened a lot sooner. Maybe it should have happened when he continued to act in an unrepentant way. But as the saying goes, better late than never.”

While the ADL was heartened by Skechers’ immediate refusal to meet with West when he showed up at the footwear company’s Los Angeles offices with a film crew to discuss a deal on Oct. 26, worries persisted. It could be that brands got the message that toxicity costs a lot—losses to Adidas are estimated at $246 million—or it could simply be that West became too hot to touch for now. West, and other hate offenders, tend to come back into marketers embrace after a period out of the spotlight.

Adidas’ next steps

What’s necessary is getting brands to anticipate these kinds of problems and to have processes in place that quickly head off controversy, said Peter Prodromou, president of independent agency Boathouse.

“On broader strategic and cultural levels, [Adidas and other brands] should evaluate and listen to what constituents—employees, customers, influencers—have to say and instill in their culture an attitude of openness and commitment to social responsibility reflective of a responsible organization in the 21st century,” Prodromou said. “There are data showing corporations are now trusted more than government, civic institutions and churches, for better or worse. With that trust comes responsibility and expectations by constituents that these brands will reflect their values.”

For Adidas specifically, the brand has more to worry about than the $246 million loss associated with pulling the Yeezy line off the market, said Dr. Dustin York, director of the undergraduate and graduate communications programs at Maryville University.

“If I’m Adidas, I’m thinking about how we can use our current attention as an opportunity to put a spotlight on diversity and inclusion,” said Dr. York, who has worked as a marketing and PR professional with notable brands such as Nike, PepsiCo and Scottrade Financial Services. “They’ve made a significant financial decision to cut ties with someone who goes against its values. Now, this is an opportunity to showcase the inclusive artists we’re currently collaborating with and the products they are creating for Adidas.”

Whether or not Adidas can move on swiftly from the West debacle, the lessons for brands are clear, the ADL’s Greenblatt said. It’s a matter of recognizing that when it comes to a brand partnership, it’s all in or all out.

The power of brands

In July 2020, the ADL linked up with other civil rights organizations, such as the NAACP, Color of Change, Common Sense and others, to call for an advertiser boycott of Facebook. The “Stop the Hate for Profit” campaign took aim at the social network after the Cambridge Analytica data breach along with findings about the ways racist groups were indoctrinating and harassing users unimpeded.

Staged as a month-long advertising pause, the campaign attracted 1,100 of the world’s leading brands, including Unilever, Coca-Cola, Chipotle and Hershey’s to demand Facebook do more to curtail extremism on the social network.

While the 100-year-old ADL’s tactics have changed over the years, encouraging brands to be on the frontline pushing back against militant forms of antisemitism, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia and violent conspiracy theories is central to its mission.

“It’s fair to say, in the society in which we live, at a time when participation in organized religion is down and when trust in institutions has dropped—a time when cynicism about politics is higher than ever—brands play a critical role,” Greenblatt said. “People increasingly express their personal values through brands. They mediate their lives through brands.”

For consumers, a brand label is a badge of sorts that expresses what they care about and who they are, he added. Businesses talk about being values-driven. So, in Greenblatt’s view, they should be expected to live those values. When brands don’t do that, consumers and stakeholders need to hold them accountable.

“I’ve heard and saw people say, ‘I’m not wearing my Yeezys again, I’m not wearing [Adidas tennis shoe] Stan Smiths again, I’m not wearing that Adidas track suit,’” Greenblatt said. “I’m sure Adidas was monitoring social just as closely as we did and seeing the negative feedback. That’s why the break between Adidas and Kanye was so important.”

Still, the satisfaction of holding Adidas accountable for West’s behavior comes with the seeds of future backlash. In essence, can successfully pressuring brands to sever business ties with West play into the very conspiracy theory about “Jewish control” that the artist was fanning in the first place?

Ultimately, celebrities and the brands and organizations that support them serve as models for behavior. In most cases, it’s about style. But public behavior and styles of speech provide signals of where the bounds of what’s acceptable—and what’s prohibited—are drawn, Greenblatt said.

It’s not a perfect model, the ADL leader acknowledged.

“I don’t know that the hate can be solved, even though we’re always working toward a world without hate,” Greenblatt said. “The only way that we get there is by education—calling out what is unacceptable and relying on a ‘whole of society’ approach to uphold standards of respectful discourse is the only way to stop hate when we’re confronted by it.”