S06.EP04 - Should Brands Get Political? with Jeroen Reuven

0:03Hello and welcome to Just Branding. The only podcast dedicated to helping designers and entrepreneurs grow brands. Here are your hosts, Jacob Kass and Matt Davies.

0:21Hello fellow brand builder. We have some huge news to kick off today's episode and we couldn't be more excited to share it with you. After years of connecting with creative entrepreneurs, designers, strategists and marketers like you, we realize the need for something bigger, a place where brand builders can truly thrive, grow and support each other. So today we're thrilled to share with you the launch of the Brand Builders Alliance, our brand new exclusive membership for brand builders just like you. So whether you're looking to sharpen your branding skills, grow your business or connect with like-minded creatives, the Alliance is here to help you level up.

1:00As a member, you'll get fortnightly masterclasses, expert coaching from Matt, myself and our team of resident coaches, exclusive resources and access to an incredible community of branding professionals who truly get it. The waitlist is now open. Head over to our website joinbba.com to secure your spot and become a part of the movement. That's joinbba.com. Now let's get in today's episode. Well hello folks and welcome to this episode of Just Branding. We are super excited to have Jeroen Boos with us. He is a native Dutchman who came to New York years ago via Israel. He has the distinction of being Steve Jobs's art director for a couple of years and is known together with Joyce Thomas for the creation of the Priceless campaign for Mastercard.

1:56He's helped American Express come up with actual new products and introducing those and he's done other numerous global campaigns of which some have been running for decades. Jeroen started Darling, his agency, in New York 17 years ago on the premise of service, value and creative quality. Darling is running as fast as the not so fast Eclare train from Amtrak which he also launched and I've probably pronounced All of those, including Jeroen's name, probably completely wrong, as I will do throughout this whole episode. But welcome to the podcast, Jeroen. It's great to have you with us. Thank you, Matt Davidson.

2:36Oh, no, it's Matt Davies. Oh, wait a moment. Sorry. Just call me Bob. Yeah, it could be Bob Davidson. Thanks a lot, Matt. All right. Well, this is exciting. I'm thrilled to have you on. And folks, what is it that we're going to be talking about today? So this is kind of, you know, I don't know. I think we're treading where many podcasts will not naturally tread. In fact, you know, I'm a little bit nervous. I've got to be honest, folks. It's very rare that I'm nervous, but I'm a little bit nervous because we're going to open up the Pandora's box of whether or not brands should get involved in politics.

3:10Now, I think it's fair to say that Jacob and I and the Just Branding podcast are non-political. Like we, you know, we don't tend to take political sides or comment. And I'm hoping that we can try and tread that careful line together today. But, you know, maybe we shouldn't be doing that, Jacob. Maybe we should be jumping in and getting all political and so on and so forth. But let's let's tuck into all of those subjects in a minute. I think it's going to be a very interesting and insightful podcast to explore with you, Yeru. So first of all, before we get into all that juicy stuff, tell us a little bit about your backstory, your background, and basically how you've become interested in the way brands handle politics.

3:55Well, that's a great question. I never really paid attention to politics and brands. You know, you grow up in this business. You start off as an art director. You become a creative director. You're being pulled into the copy side of it as well. And especially when you have your own company, you have to wear so many hats. And actually, the first time it started was probably at Ogilvy. I was a high-up creative director there, and I had a huge group. And somebody came to me and said, oh, yeah, we're doing our annual gay ad for Miller Beer. And I was stunned. I was like, our annual Miller gay ad, you know, in print, no less, right?

4:44In those days, it was like in print. Oh, yeah. And this is running mostly in San Francisco. I mean, you couldn't write a bigger cliche than that request, right? And I just, I was stunned. I was like, okay, what is this? We're just tipping our heads, you know? I mean, if the word pandering would have been invented on that conversation alone, you know it would have been it would have been right right so i over the years became very sensitive to it and and you could see people in meetings you know being politically correct right pc came up you know right around uh the late uh 19th so that's like 2000 and you know everything became pc pc pc so you went into meetings casting meetings or whatever and it was like yeah well well, guess what?

5:33We have a blonde, we have a blonde, we have a blonde. You know what's missing? We don't have a black person. We don't have a black person. And it became even more so today where you watch a television and almost nobody's white anymore, which is another issue. And then if you have four people in the room, it's got to be a black person, an Asian person, a white person, and a Hispanic person. You tick off all those boxes. Now, what does it have to do with politics? Everything, because everything became and was made political in advertising that way. And I thought it just wasn't genuine. It wasn't genuine.

6:11If you do three, four, five, six spots and you see the right actor and the right actor is black, so what? So the actor is black. That's it. I'm not choosing the actor because he or she is black. I'm choosing them because they're great actors. And so I always held that kind of, maybe it's naive, but that kind of like purist look of things and saying that, you know, it shouldn't be that way. I was once asked off an account, we were producing amazing commercials, according to other people, and there was an end scene in a commercial of a veteran saluting a grave. And the grave was in a military cemetery.

6:57So it was an amazing, you know, amazing frame, right? This lonely man in his, you know, kind of like Vietnam outfit, right? Typical Vietnam vet. And he's saluting the gray. And he was black. We chose him to be black. And the client says, no, we shouldn't make him black because blacks were casted for these roles, you know, to become soldiers more than white people. He made it political like you never would do that even yourself. And I was fired because I became very passionate about it. I said, no, that's why you should be black, perhaps. I said, but he's just a great face, a great person, looks fantastic.

7:40Let's put him in this role. And he asked me of the business. So politics are everywhere. And I think it's interesting to explore that. I'd particularly be keen to dive into the sensitive area. I mean, you're talking about race and, you know, there's a whole, you know, tricky minefield of critical race theory and white privilege and all that stuff. And I'm keen that we perhaps don't go too sensitively into those areas. But I don't think we can pass this part of the discussion without mentioning the Black Lives Matter movement, which obviously was huge a few years ago. And many, many brands kind of took up an activist stance, a social justice stance, and adopted what that organization stood for.

8:26So I'd love to get your thoughts on that. Why do you feel those brands were compelled to do so? And what risks do you think that they took whilst entering into such a kind of a decision? yeah black lives matter is a huge example here blm as it's now just called started you know all the way down in florida the drop in the bucket was for three black women and i say three black women because later on it changed hands and it you know it's no longer today what it was then but it was started for the right reasons after the killer of i think it was traven martin he got are free in Florida. And that was it.

9:07But think about this. As brands go and they need building, even Black Lives Matter was almost like it became a brand and really, really grew exponentially seven years later. And seven years later, the mass protests began after the killing of yet another black person, George Floyd. And that was it. That became national. Everybody was talking about it and that inspired nike right nike to pledge 140 million dollars um with the uh the jordan brand as well i'm sure michael jordan jumped in as well in support of education economic empowerment uh social justice to black related organizations right nike also ran an ad for once don't do it so this is this is unusual for nike right they for once don't do it now in the creative communities that was like, oh, isn't that great?

10:05You know, they take, just do it. They switch it around. Look how creative this is. And the next day I thought about it and I thought it was major pandering. And I said so. I said so publicly on LinkedIn and on a couple of platforms and people attacked me immediately. And then there were a few people who said, you know what? I thought about it for another day and I think you're right. And I thought it was major pandering coming from Nike, right? Who in their long, long list of sponsoring and supporting education, right? Never ever did anything like it. So they jumped on this bandwagon that I thought was like, okay, let's see who else is jumping on this bandwagon because it's not the right way to do it.

10:52Right? In my view, this is very personal, but if Nike would have come out and say, you know what, we're giving these$140 million to the cops. And we're giving them to the cops on the premise that they should educate themselves so that this will never ever happen again. That would have been a move, right? That would have been like, wow, can you imagine? But no, they gave it to supporting education and whatever. And then it kind of like disappears. The issue disappears, the money disappears. Hopefully it's being used for good causes, but it's not, it's pandering. So you have to be very, very careful.

11:30You know, Donahue was the Nike CEO at the time. He was only there for a couple of years, by the way. And he literally came out and he says, I've been asking myself how to respond during times like these, both as a citizen, as a member of the Nike family. Let me be clear as I can. Nike is opposed to bigotry. Big deal. Of course, they were opposed to bigotry. Why are you even saying that? We are opposed to hatred and in quality in all its forms. At that point, you start thinking like, who is he saying this to? Is he saying this to his black customers? Indirect and overt, while Nike cannot solve injustice.

12:07You're right, Nike, you can't. I believe we have a responsibility to work towards addressing it to the best of our ability. What we can do is inspire and empower ourselves and others to action and try to help shape a better society by serving as a beacon of hope and resilience. Goobly-goob, sorry. sorry, Nike CEO, where were you a month ago? Where were you a year ago? You know what I'm saying? It's pure pandering. Look, you have to understand something. This was really the bucket spilling over, right? I mean, Traven Martin was horrible. There were a lot of people in between. George Floyd, that killed us all.

12:48That was just pure, pure hatred. So America was emotional, and it was emotional for everyone. But you cannot all of a sudden become political. You can't dive in as a brand and say, I'm going to solve this with$140 million. So what do you think the risks are like not getting involved? Like Black Lives Matter was such a mass movement, wasn't it? And brands felt compelled to get involved. You know, everyone, I remember on Instagram, there was a lot of people, they just put in the black squares up, like loads of brands were doing it in support. and as you say it kind of felt you know a little bit virtue signally if you like um without meaning you had to actually do very much it was just oh we just you know put a black square up and you know that we we've ticked the box kind of thing as you say or you know it did become pandering but like what what was the risks of not joining the bandwagon do you think for some of the brands that is the question because we had at the time we had already a national brand and it's a you know it's on everybody's table it's salt you know it's table salt and it's a 140 year old brand and they called us the next day they said what should we do and i said well the longer you wait the longer it becomes a me too thing right then it's no longer which is another is another organization, of course, that came out right about the same time.

14:16But then it becomes too clear that you're basically doing it because other people are doing it. Nike was pretty fast with it. But if you wait too long, then it's a me too thing. You have to understand when Nike did it, that was the second time they did it because they also earlier sponsored or not sponsored, but stood by Colin Capron. I don't know if you remember that. That's an NFL quarterback. and he kneeled during a protest at the playing of the national anthem before an nfl game he kneeled in protest right and then nike said you know what he's one of us meaning you know he's one of the the long long list of athletes that that we sponsor or we have a contract with and so they launched the believe in something campaign and they actually lost money on that they lost according to Forbes, they lost$4 billion in sales just by standing by with Colin Kaepernick, right?

15:13But here's the thing. They also, on the other side, so that's people that disagree with that and whatever, and now they're cutting up the Nikes and it becomes a social media thing and all that. But on the other side, people were like, yeah, cool, right? Nike's cool. And they gained$6 billion back because they stood with him. So there you go,$2 billion in profits at the end. But it's now long forgotten. And even at the time of their spot, for once, don't do it, everybody had already forgotten about Colin Kaepernick. That is the blessing and the curse of joining politics. The blessing is maybe it goes away really, really fast.

15:54The curse is maybe it never goes away. yeah what comes to mind is the the pepsi pepsi ad when they got involved with it and it just seems so off off kilter i can't remember all the details but are you familiar with that ad yeah so what happens there is they really made a mistake it sounded totally off and it wasn't you know it wasn't first of all it's not on brand that's the other thing politics are not on your a brand, don't brand, but, you know, if you're joining a popular cause, before you dive in, is that really your brand? This is, you know, this is Pepsi. Pepsi saying something really important.

16:33This is a shoemaker, right? A billion, billion, trillion dollar, who knows? Shoemaker, right? Who comes out and says something like that. Guys, your brands, your things, your products, I like you for it. Stay in your corner, right? Pepsi, make sure you're cold when I drink you, and Nike, make sure the shoe fits and that's it. Right? And shut up. Don't go any further than that. So, yeah, in the case of Pepsi, it was so... People actually made fun of it. They felt bad for it. I was like, oh, my God, no. Don't do this. Don't do this. We talked about the one with Kendall Jenner, who was depicted as kind of solving social unrest by handing out Pepsis to police officers during protests.

17:18Is that the one we're thinking of? I thought that was the one. Yeah. Is that the one? Yep. I was trying to think who it was, but yeah, that's it. So, so yeah. Talk us through why that probably wasn't the best idea to, for Pepsi to do. You know, number one is it's planned, right? So it's not, it's, it's, it's carefully, it's carefully orchestrated. It's a celebrity. It's, you know, there's security there, you know, there's cameras there. It's a camera opportunity. And then worse than that, it's actually put in a commercial to sell, to sell goodwill. It was the worst thing they could have done, the worst thing.

18:01if a brand wants to help out or all that a what are you doing there but i'm i'm saying look if nike would have come to me and said look we have 40 140 million dollars what are we going to do with that how are we going to spend that let's spend it on education i would have said yeah education of whom right let's educate those cops and yeah there's going to be a stir about it but And at the end of the day, the mothers of those kids screaming in the street at night, at dinner, will tell them, well, guess what? Nike's actually right. You know what I'm saying? Like, that would have been nobler. But I would have voted against anything.

18:41Stay out of it. Seriously, stay out of it. Stay out of it. If you want to silently, you know, do something, if you say Nike is going to, you know, donate to this or this or this, it's just a box that you tick off. and people will say, oh, that's nice, Nike. Anything else on sale in the store? I mean, you want to stay out of it, seriously. You very much understand, so just stay out of it. But when is a good time to get involved? And how do you actually understand when it goes beyond just pandering? I've discovered a few ways of how brands enter politics or politics enter brands, right? But there are cases where a brand just goes towards politics.

19:28It just becomes political. It decides to become political. And a lot of CMOs, a lot of CEOs, especially founders, right, ask themselves, look how successful we are. We have a platform. You know, I need to speak out. And you hear this from actors too, right? Actors say, well, I have a responsibility to speak out because I have a platform, right? Whatever that means. It just means that they have a million followers or 10 million followers or, if they're lucky, 50 million followers. Brands can sometimes start up trouble themselves. Patagonia is a beautiful example. Patagonia, the founder, very respected for being frontrunners in the green world, right?

20:12Recycling, you know, ecologically aware, right? So they came out with the most ridiculous, I think, and again, that's my opinion, the most ridiculous statement ever. I've ever heard a brand made. and their statement was the privately held company is reluctant to market to companies it deems ecologically damaging including religious groups churches food groups political affiliated companies or groups and financial institutions and more and why did they say that because they didn't want to sell their vests you know and their jackets their vests especially to certain companies. Why? Because in the world of banks and hedge fund managers and traders and bond traders and whatever, if you go to these floors, there's this weird, weird phenomenon that everybody wears pedagogy of vests.

21:14And nobody knows why. These guys walk around in their short haircuts and slacks and whatever, and they have nice shoes on, and then they have nice shirts on. And then over that shirt is that vest from Patagonia. And usually it's co-branded, right? So the company name is there as well. Well, Patagonia woke up one day and said, enough is enough. We don't want to sell to you anymore. Why? Because you're not, you know, you don't fit our brand. And they called it, and they actually used the term brand alignment. So with other words, and they also announced, by the way, that they only co-brand companies who practice regenerative farming and environmental activism.

21:59So what does that mean? That is a brand that seeks out to become political. And you can do that if everybody agrees. It's not nice to your employees if they don't believe it. But hey, this is the founder, highly respected, a real pioneer when it comes to green thinking. in a company like that, if that's even possible, but they claim they are, and they're highly respected for it.

22:35See, this is an interesting thought. You mentioned the employees inside these organisations as well, because if you take any political issue, usually there are, you know, 50 % of people would agree, and 50 on roughly you know on a general generalist issue 50 50 um so you know i i often think from a strategic perspective if a brand does decide to enter a political stance on whatever the issue might be you're going to alienate 50 of your audience right uh but the other 50 are going to think you're amazing right but the same happens internally right so what do you do if 50 of your staff disagree with the stance that you're making like this is a huge risk it seems to my mind strategically that you are making if you come out and uh and ride your high horse um you know and and try and you know make a make a political statement have you checked with your c-suite that everybody is all aligned with whatever the marketing campaign uh manager is deciding to uh to push through because if you're not then you could find 50 percent of your workforce the next day don't show up because they're so appalled at whatever it is that you're pushing so it's it's something worth you know worth considering and i wonder if in some of these instances like you you talked to you talked about some of the brands if they've if they've done that another just another small thing right on the side but like as you say sometimes brands deliberately enter those spaces like Patagonia like you've mentioned other times I find you know politics visits for a period of time so I don't know if you heard about this but in the UK at the time Richie Sunak was uh spotted uh what did an interview and he was wearing some Adidas I can't remember what they were it was Sambras or something like a particular brand of Adidas trainers and um it kind of blew up online like because it was like obviously he's the prime minister what he was at the time and um you know there was kind of a lot of discussion i was actually asked to comment on it by draper's magazine um and and so i was like they were saying oh do you think this is going to have an impact on like adidas's sales like do you you know is adidas going to lose its street cred and my comment at the time was very much around well i think some people will be appalled that the prime minister who they hate is wearing that brand but i think other people will think it's great so I don't think there's I think there's going to be a net it will make no difference frankly which isn't what Drapers magazine wanted me to say I don't think but that that's that was my comment and it turned out actually it had a bit of an uplift like the the Samba brand of shoes you know was sold more because of you know what you can imply it was because of the press that it was given by the prime minister where of the time wearing them but yeah really interesting I mean the the press took it in a negative way I was thinking it was going to be neutral it actually had a positive uplift politics visited adidas in that instance and they are the draper's magazine asked me what should adidas do and i said they should do absolutely nothing right absolutely nothing they can't say that their product shouldn't be worn by you know politicians or a particular brand of politicians they shouldn't discriminate on their customers it's up to the customer to decide whether or not they want to buy or not that's surely freedom of choice.

25:57If a brand comes out like you mentioned with Patagonia and says, no, you're not allowed, we deemed you not acceptable enough to purchase our product. Is that the role of a brand to do that? Surely the brand should orientate itself towards a market, but surely we live in free country. Anyone should be able to buy anything that they wish to buy. It seems to me anyway. What are your thoughts on that, Jeroen? I think in that case, you're right. You let it blow over because that that goes away really really fast right it did uh it you know it goes now you could have uh a dealers might have might have made a joke of it right humor always helps they could have placed a print ad or digital ad that is print ad also because it's not completely dead yet or a poster somewhere in london but even that you know a print is probably the best because it only lasts three to four or five seconds, right?

26:52You read it, you laugh at it, and that's it, and it's over. So there are cases in politics where you just make a joke of it and then it blows over. But it's funny because Adidas had a tough year, right? This year and the end of last year. They had a really, really tough year. And this is also something that happens with politics, which is politics can be brought into a brand by a spokesperson, influencer, or a celebrity, right? sometimes all three are the same person. So a celebrity endorsement, as we all can figure out, can be very risky. They do and will say, you know, if you think about it, anything on social media, right?

27:34You can write a contract all you want, but you can't really stop the damage that it can cause them in an instant. They blow up, they go out, they have a party, they do something, they say something or whatever, it can blow up, right? And drag a brand into a political situation. overnight right now in the case of adidas if i may if i may you know just expand on that they made two really unfortunate choices in a row right they went into business with kanye west and he became a spokesperson but he also became a partner you know they started to design shoes together blah blah blah and that was really really bad because kanye west went nuts and then after that, that wasn't enough.

28:16So then somebody made the not so bright decision to choose model Bella Hadid, right? And Bella Hadid also had an opinion about herself, dragged in her own personal politics. And man, did that go south fast, right? And not only that, Bella Hadid exposed Adidas and really said, you know, are you with me or not? And people started to investigate Adidas and went straight back to the founding of Adidas and now opened this can of worms. This is what politics can do. And what did they find out? They find out that Adidas, the original name is Adi Dassler, right? And he started the company with his brother Rudolf Dassler.

29:00And I won't go into this for very deep, but that was during the Second World War. And these guys, they became SS. They made boots for the Nazis. And then, you know, in 1947, Adi split up with Rudolf. Rudolf started Puma and Adi started Adidas. And that's what politics can do. Right. They can also dig up the past. fascinating in terms of jumping on the bandwagon that you mentioned and you know do you do you see that happen a lot do you feel like like brands feel that they need to enter some of these spaces because their peers or in their category others feel the need to jump in do you see that happening a lot do you think because i do and i wonder what your thoughts on like this idea of peer pressure You kind of hinted at it earlier when you were saying Nike was early to the discussion around BLM, for example.

29:54But do you see any other kind of issues? Like the whole green thing is huge, particularly here in the UK. What are your thoughts on entering because you feel like you have to as a brand? That is the question a lot of CMOs are dealing with, struggling with. I think they get pressure from all kinds of people. we were just mentioning employees, right? So you get a lot of pressure from employees that way too, which will change the cost of a brand. If every employee says, you know, we really should be this or that, or we really should try to do this or that and tell the public about it, and it's about green thinking, recycling, you know.

30:34We spoke about Patagonia before. Can you imagine working there? I mean, you're really aware of it, right? So it can come from the inside. It can come from the outside. The outside, the bandwagon, so to speak, yeah, green has become a very noble way of saying, you know, we as a brand are evolving. We're being more responsible. We're being this, we're being that. It was years ago when I did an ad for Coca-Cola. We didn't produce it, but it was at McCann. And we said to Coca-Cola, hey, wouldn't it be great to do an ad about a Coca-Cola can? Right? It's crushed a little bit. and the headline is, we don't mind if this comes back as a Pepsi.

31:16And it was all about recycling. I don't know. They wanted to throw me out of the window. They didn't get it at all. But here's the but. Bandwagon is green, responsibility, et cetera, recycling, being environmentally aware. That has turned into politics. Think about it. You know, they already are saying that on day one, the president-elect right now in the United States will turn back certain environmental business choking rules and regulations, as they call it. So what does that mean? That means that when you now talk green, you must be progressive and you must be on the left. And that's unfair.

32:00right i know a lot of conservative people who are green who are you know very environmentally aware of things and and everything so you can't just look at brands that way but that that that's the danger of that particular bandwagon if you overdo it that's it you must be a lefty you must be this you must be that now i don't think that a lot of people care about that but if you look at Levi's, for instance, if I may bring up an example. Levi's is, you know, everybody, who doesn't wear Levi's, right? There's a funny bandwagon they jumped up, which was gun control. So Levi's and gun control. They thought it was an issue.