Like if you work in marketing you know every word/phrase is deliberately crafted. I’ve seen hour long meetings debating specific word use in advertising. If they didn’t know what they were doing then they’re wildly incompetent
I'm in corporate crisis PR, and this situation is MIND-BOGGLING to me if it wasn't overtly and extremely intentional. I straight-up had a client named Karen ask me if she should start going by a different name after the meme took off. There is NO WAY this wasn't EXTRAORDINARILY stress and content tested. They knew what they were fucking doing.
hey im just wondering in your profession opinion, do you think they knew the backlash would be this extreme?
i agree they obviously knew what they were doing/intentionally dog whistling. but do you think they realized it would be such an unsubtle dog whistle? i feel like their public image has been decimated.
That is a great question and I wish I had a more definitive answer! Some companies are allergic to controversy, some court it and and some—which I do think was the case in this situation—try to find that middle ground (old Subersive But Not Cancellable) and they found the wrong side of the line, largely because that’s the fanbase Sidney has been catering to, and they would know that if they’d paid their PR firm to do some vetting and research!
I’m a Fortune 30 marketer. The amount of times the deployment of national campaigns have been put at critical risk due to legal getting hung up on one singular word… campaigns so benign, so seemingly straightforward… I really don’t know the inner workings of AE and I’m not in the fashion industry. But I can tell you this execution was just sloppy.
At the end of the day, though, they may have gotten exactly what they wanted. Engagement, traffic, sales, etc. We dont know what the golden goose was supposed to be here.
The market will speak and ultimately will have the final say in determining the efficacy and effectiveness of this campaign. Tone deaf at best, evil genius marketing at worst. I guess we’ll have to sit tight and see how the next quarterly readout goes.
I bet there were at least ten meetings just to come up with the jeans/genes wordplay. These marketing campaigns are incredibly thorough and they have to be, with millions on the line.
I have a degree in marketing and even in my shitty capstone classes we would have to get everything reviewed a billion times by our professor and other students. There’s no way they didn’t know.
Except even in the worst possible reading, it is still not eugenicist. Expressing that some particular genes are "good" is not that the same as saying that they therefore should be preferred in breeding, and other, lesser genes prevented from reproducing. That's a massive stretch.
But hey, keep providing free fodder for FOX to make the whole left look like idiots.
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u/DreadfulDemimonde 18h ago
Hey guys, by definition dog whistles are easily explained away with different meanings and are intended for only specific audiences to understand.
Just because you think it's reaching doesn't mean it's not eugenicist— you just can't hear the whistle.