It is increasingly becoming
a precarious time for corporations. More
and more when they make the bare minimum of token marketing techniques to
minorities of any distinction, they are immediately slammed by the conservative
media and politicians as being ‘woke’ and suffer immense backlash, These marketing
decisions are always mocked by progressives as the business decisions they are
and when these corporations retreat, they will be fileted in the progressive
media for being cowards.
They are now being told in
articles throughout the media to ‘pick a side’.
I find this ironic since a corporation is not, despite Mitt Romney’s misstatement
in 2012, a person. It is a group of people who are trying to run a business and
they must try to make the decision that is best for the bottom line.
Corporations don’t need to pick a side: the world is forcing them too because
that’s the world we live in.
There is no world where
anybody will walk out of this completely satisfied, so I think the best
approach going forward would be blunt honesty. I realize this goes against everything
advertising stands for, but you might get some points for it. So here is a
boilerplate model of a statement I believe it is in the interest of any major corporation
to issue when it runs an advertising campaign directed at any major minority or
demographic:
“There has been a great deal
of controversy in the last several days about our ad campaign dedicated to
(insert minority group here) by our company. Many on certain cable networks have accused us
of having committed a sin far greater than embezzlement, sexual assault or
murder (some of which our employees are guilty of ) that of being ‘woke’.
I would like to remind the
conservative media that corporations are entities and not people who are
remarkable, even spectacularly, unenlightened. Really, every time we got to a
corporate retreat; every member of the care-staff has to sign several NDAs.
No, like every decision a
corporation makes, it is purely an economic one. Our staff of accountants have run
the numbers and made it very clear that in order to continue to maintain immense
profits rather than simply large ones, we must market to more accessible markets.
I would like to apologize to
the progressive community by referring to this minority group that you spent so
much time advocating for in public as a market rather than the terms you prefer
to use in your many blogs against conservatives: demographics.
Now I realize that our
decision to do so will cause the kind of outrage that seems to be roused by
conservative media when M and M’s wear high heels or an African-American is
cast as a superhero. I would only remind them that they have been spent decades
advocating for being pro-business and letting the free market rule. And if you truly believe in this philosophy,
you must also acknowledge that business must sell their products to everybody,
not solely the people who watch your show or vote for you. We made a similar business calculation in
regards to advertising on your networks over the years and you didn’t seem to object
to that.
As for progressives, we do
not expect you say anything other than business as usual. We know that, as a
rule, you then to view all corporations as de facto evil. That you have decided
to personify something that you agree is not a person is hard to fathom, but
like the conservatives you mock, we know very well you are similarly devoid of
self-awareness. We will never be like all of you and do anything for real, pure
reasons like ethics and purity of purpose; whenever we do something that
resembles it’s a step towards progress, it’s only because we’re interested in
the bottom line. We will never credit for the good things we do, but we will
always get blamed for the bad things. And of course we deserve them because we
encouraged Republican office seeker by making huge campaign donations for
massive tax breaks. (On a separate note, we have a motion to dismiss against
the injunction to keep us from printing a record of all the Democratic Congressmen
we donated money to over the years to vote for massive corporate tax breaks.)
Look I know you will never
feel sorry for a corporation but you’ve got to admit in this era where
everything in tribal, it can be very difficult for a business who wants to sell
its goods to everyone, not just Democrats or Republicans. Hell, at the most
recent corporate retreat, you can’t imagine all the arguments that we hear from
our colleagues in the entertainment industry. They make a suggestion of a Latino James Bond
or an LGBTQ+ superhero and they will be facing massive protest and boycotts
from everybody online complaining that they’re being un-American or violating
some kind of natural order. And a lot of
them are actually getting annoyed that trying to meet what you claim you want doesn’t
make a difference. Look, I get that millions of baby Boomers were upset when the
female Ghostbusters came out but its not like millions of women and LGBTQ+
came in their place to stop it from becoming a box-office disaster. Your community claims you want more gay love
stories: they made Bros, nobody came. You want to argue that their movies are
designed a certain way because foreign markets won’t tolerate them. American
markets don’t seem to give us much of an argument that you’d come anyway.
Same with everybody now
irritated that the LIV and the PGA are merging because the Saudis are ‘sportswashing’
their reputation. You do know only fans
get to think of sports as a game? Everyone else involves is making money off it,
so it is a business. The Supreme Court and Congress have said as much on every sport.
You are paying money to watch it, whether you go to a game or watch it on cable. And as for conservatives, the games are not
played by robots but human beings. Human beings are entitled to opinions. No
one’s telling you to follow LeBron James on Twitter.
And of course, there was
that sad conversation with the head of the IOC last year. They’ve got a lot of
problems, not the least of which is that they’re taking a lot of heat that they
keep letting autocratic countries bid on the Olympic Games. They’re trying to
come up with a slogan that expresses: “We’ve tried selling to the democracies
and they keep turning us down.” Photo-montages showing what it was like in
Athens after the 2004 games or Rio after the 2016 campaigns. It’s a work in
progress.
And every time you learn
that we sell our goods to a country one of your groups don’t like – which considering
both sides hate list is pretty massive – we do wonder if you know what the
definition of a multi-national corporation is. I mean, it’s right there
in the name. Right, I know the donations to the GOP; we brought it on
ourselves. Not like the bastions of
integrity who represent Detroit, Seattle and pretty much all of California.
It’s things like this that make us all want to
occasionally look outside our balconies and contemplate if it’s worth it all.
But then we remember the simple truth.
You need us. Both sides. The
Republican Party has been the pro-business party for over a century. Your
patron saint put it best: “Government is not the solution to problem.
Government is the problem.” And hundreds of his followers did the next natural
thing and ran for office. You’ve spent a
century saying that the corporate world will always be better than the government
every time, no matter how many of us go under or have bad management or run one
into the ground. What are you going do, argue for regulation?
As for Democrats, if there
were no corporations what would you raise your online mobs about? Sure you’ll
spend your outrage against racial oppression or the GOP or the conservative media,
but at the end of the day we’re your boogeyman. Because corporations aren’t people
you can attack them in your blogs with almost no fear of legal action. You
might never buy coffee at a Starbucks or eat lunch at a Chick-fil-A or drink
Bud Light or shop at a Wal-Mart and even if you do, we all know that hypocrisy
is one of our biggest seller. You spend
your days yelling at Twitter but you have no problem posting tweets of your
allies on your blog. You might yell at Amazon
for not unionizing but that won’t stop you from ordering on it an hour later.
See the thing is, we’re not
going away. Not corporations, but capitalism. We’ve been around forever, we even
pre-date democracy. Not even Bernie
Sanders or AOC would end a post with the hashtag Defund The Dollar. And if you can’t
be a pro-business candidate and then decide you don’t like the basic model of
business. A large society can not exist
on a barter system or without currency.
And you know this. We make
your lives easier. We’re a rural economy
now. In your heart of hearts, do you truly want to go back to the days where
the only way to get food was to grow it yourself? Where the only way to get
clothes was to drive ten miles to the local dry goods store? Where the only way
to see a movie was to wait for it come to your town six months after it had
played in every major city in America? Your lives are easier now. Maybe not
better, but easier. And let’s not kid ourselves; at the end of the day most of
you are fine with that.
Don’t pretend that these
boycotts bother us much long term. If you were united against it, we might have
a problem. But given your division, if one side stops buying our goods, we can
make just enough money selling it to the other.
This concludes our statement.
We will be submitting it in a written form to the media, so that both major
parties, commentators and social media advocates, can use it to support their
side of the argument and fund-raise off it.”
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