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As far as big-brand Pride campaigns go, The North Face’s latest was fairly innocuous: drag queen Pattie Gonia inviting viewers to “come out” into the wilderness as part of its Summer of Pride campaign. “Nature lets you be who you are,” The North Face cheerfully posted on Instagram.
What followed was a chorus of stories from right-leaning sites claiming The North Face was pushing a lifestyle on kids, causing gender confusion and turning Pride month into a whole summer. Partisan sites on the left jumped in to defend, praising the brand for “standing up to hate” and calling objectors “conservative cry babies.”
Pride month had barely begun, and we’d already seen this pattern play out several times: Bud Light, Target, the Los Angeles Dodgers, Kohl’s and PetSmart.
Big brands have supported Pride in various ways for years, but in 2023 any brand putting out rainbow merchandise risks backlash. And while some of this is a symptom of the political moment we’re living through, we cannot look past the role of hyper-partisan ad-supported media in making the outrage cycles worse, particularly around LGBTQ+ issues.
While there are examples of extreme vitriol on both the right and left, that doesn’t mean the instances are exactly equal and opposite. You probably have a very strong opinion of which side bears the most blame—and half the country believes the exact opposite.
What matters for brands is that enough people are convinced that their political opponents are literally threatening the bodies and lives of their children, and they are worked up enough to boycott, counter-boycott and affect the market cap of any brand.
And the outrage cycle has consequences: Just ask Bud Light, which was just unseated after two decades as America’s top-selling beer brand.
There is a thriving online ecosystem of websites that sort of look like news whose content is hyper-partisan and so highly opinionated that it regularly crosses the line into propaganda and misinformation. Some telltale signs that you’re on one of these sites are that they tell you it’s specifically for your side, and the content is short, biased, angry and lacks journalistic effort.
Media professionals and journalists rightfully recoil at the term “fake news,” which is pejorative and unhelpful. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have an honest discussion about media bias, which we all know is real and can be measured.
When I founded Ad Fontes Media and started tracking bias five years ago, I found the more biased the media, the more likely the media to be non-fact-based and unreliable—in practical terms, the more likely it is to slap a headline on a “story” that is nothing more than bashing or praising of a Marjorie Taylor Greene tweet.
But Madison Avenue also played a huge role in creating this world when it launched an industry around the concept of brand safety within the last decade.
The rationale for it made sense at the time: As advertising moved online and was increasingly bought indirectly through tech platforms, marketers wanted assurances that their ads would not appear next to broadly defined “inappropriate” content. But in practice, brand safety has been implemented by the blunt force tool of keyword-blocking news topics, which effectively leads many advertisers out of the news category altogether.
An estimated 80% of brand ad dollars have left news over a 20-year period leading up to the pandemic, and 28% of newsroom jobs have vanished since 2008, according to the Pew Research Center. Much of that shift away from news coincided with the rise of Facebook and Google.
Ad dollars leaving news, combined with distribution through Facebook, Twitter and other social platforms, forced the media to increasingly chase more scarce revenue with more partisan headlines that appealed to emotion and outrage. It didn’t help that on Facebook, articles were stripped of context and pretty much looked the same, making it more difficult to discern quality news from the partisan sites that today manufacture and perpetuate controversy after controversy.
Brands have been trained to believe that news is inherently risky—that their ads next to bad news or controversial topics are somehow the biggest threat to brand safety. But that’s simply false: Real news is actually an opportunity for brands. What’s risky is extreme partisanship.
So while marketers sponsor Pride based on widely held notions that equality for the LGBTQ+ community is important, they also helped create the conditions that allowed partisan sites to flourish, inadvertently fueling culture wars and creating financial incentive to create more divisive content.
It doesn’t have to be this way. There’s nothing inherently wrong with bias, but in order to build a better news ecosystem, we must acknowledge it exists, as well as our own role in creating the incentives that helped get us where we are today. Marketing alone cannot fix journalism, but we can be part of the solution by directing investment to news organizations doing vital reporting in Ukraine, Washington, D.C. and in local communities, and by starving those that pander to craven political interests and stoke culture wars for profit.
What can brands do? First, they can come back to news, not just to reach its affluent and engaged audiences but to support a healthier news ecosystem that serves our economy and our democracy. One way to do that is to consider bias and reliability of news sources in buying decisions; this data already exists and can be used for planning, executing and reporting ad campaigns.
Does this mean avoiding biased news sites? Not necessarily; there is plenty of informational value on both the left and the right. Bias itself is not bad, but you need to understand and measure it to make sure your ad dollars are aligned with business goals and risk tolerances, whatever they happen to be.
One thing we cannot do is sit on the sidelines and hope that ignoring the news will keep our brands safe. As corporations branded as “woke” now must accept, the status quo of trying to ignore or block the news is not a sustainable strategy. In a partisan news ecosystem, sooner or later, the culture wars come for you.
