Friday night I watched K-pop group aespa perform just outside New York City. Karina, Converse’s new global ambassador, was singing and dancing on stage, in the most internationally diverse metro area in the United States. Meanwhile, Converse was apologizing for an image of her that America had read as a lynching.
Four Black women sat in the row in front of me, one wearing a jersey with Karina’s name on it. A Latino couple to my left. A white lesbian couple to my right. My two daughters beside me, white, Gen Alpha. Fans traded photocards and phone charms down and across the rows. And all of them were screaming every word of a song written in a language they don’t even speak.
Two rows at UBS Arena, unified in fandom. It was a beautiful snapshot of America. But that moment was disrupted by the harrowing image of the Converse ad I saw on my phone during the intermission.
A global apology for many local breakdowns
As ADWEEK reported Friday, Converse posted the ad to Threads on Sept. 3, showcasing the Chuck 70 X and its new global ambassador. Karina stands in a spotlight shaped like the Converse star. One point of it catches her white skirt as a bright pointed triangle. The shoes dangle from a hand lost in shadow. It was quickly called out as resembling a lynching.
Then a second ad went up Sept. 14, a collaboration with Palmes, a Danish lifestyle brand, posted through Converse Mexico’s Instagram Other outlets reported that Converse Malaysia’s Instagram also posted that image: A man on a ladder near a tree, sneakers held overhead.
How could such a massive global breakdown happen? Let’s start by counting the borders. A Boston-based brand. A Danish creative partner. A Korean ambassador. A multinational market channel. Now, stitch all of those into a campaign that must stand the test of American culture and collective memory.
People working on this campaign, in all these places, do not have shared cultural context. The behind-the-scenes machinery involved in running successful campaigns both locally and globally is complex and comes with risk.
Third-party collaborations multiply brand risk further. A partner in Copenhagen brings its own creative team, its own references, its own approvals, its own timeline. Add a Korean ambassador mid-world-tour, and a market channel in Latin America. The number of people involved in execution goes up. The number who feel personally responsible for the impact goes down.
One such image is an accident. Two in eleven days, from two teams, across this many countries, signifies a global business process challenge.
No CMO reviews every image shipped in every market. They approve concepts; local teams and partners select the final frames. The deck that gets signed off and the image that goes live on Converse Mexico’s Instagram are two different artifacts.
America’s racial history does not translate easily
A white triangle means nothing in most of the world. In America it means a KKK hood.
But when consumer testing data is not connected across borders, and local teams do not have access to audiences outside of their home market, they can easily create global brand risk without realizing it.
Global creative assets get tested in the lead market only, or skipped for speed. And when global testing does happen, the top line often buries the signal. Concerns by a small number of respondents can easily get written off as a small base.
My advice to every global CMO? Don’t just test the asset after it’s ready to ship. Test it earlier, at the concept stage, with multiple markets and audiences.
Include not only partner-produced work, but influencer-created content as well. And adopt a one-flag rule. If any respondent in any market names violence, hate symbolism, or historical trauma unprompted, escalate immediately to human review, regardless of the mean. No matter the political climate, consumer research is a smart risk control.
UBS Arena, where I attended the aespa concert this past weekend, sits in Elmont, a Long Island community where roughly 40% of residents are Black, and nearly half were born outside the United States. Just twenty minutes from Queens on the Long Island Rail Road
As I left the arena with my aespa branded hoodies and lightsticks that my Gen Alpha daughters will forever link back to a core memory, what struck me was this. If a Korean girl band can build such incredible loyalty, and get such a diverse and global audience to pay real money for their brand, surely a multinational like Nike can do the same.
