Conspiracy
Converse Ad Clears Every Internal Review Before Being Described By Converse As Deeply Unsettling
By Tah Foil, . BSN Network. Satire.
Converse, the footwear brand owned by Nike and responsible for a shoe that has not meaningfully changed since 1917, issued a formal apology this week after a marketing advertisement was widely compared to imagery associated with the Ku Klux Klan and the history of lynching in the United States. In a statement, the company described the image as "deeply unsettling."
The image was produced by Converse. The image was approved by Converse. The image was published by Converse. Converse would like everyone to know that the image is deeply unsettling.
What the company has not explained, and what no spokesperson has been asked to explain in any statement released to date, is the precise moment at which Converse became aware that it was Converse. There is a creative brief somewhere. There is a mood board. There is a Slack thread in which someone typed "yes, go ahead" and then added a thumbs-up emoji, and that person is currently being described, in internal communications, as a "stakeholder in the review process."
Sneaker industry analyst and media commentator Charlamagne Tha God, who has spent years documenting the specific ways corporations manage to humiliate themselves at scale, offered the following observation on his platform: "They approved it. That's what I need people to sit with. They approved it. The apology isn't for running the ad. The apology is for getting caught knowing they ran the ad."
The statement Converse released used the phrase "deeply unsettling" once, "we fell short" once, and the word "community" twice, which is the standard pharmaceutical dosage for a brand apology in the current era. There was no mention of the creative director. There was no mention of the agency. There was no mention of whether the ad was reviewed by a single person who looked at it and thought, even briefly, about what it looked like.
For context: the Converse Chuck Taylor All Star, the brand's flagship product, has been sold continuously since 1949. The company has had seventy-six years to develop institutional knowledge about what images look like to people. The marketing department has access to Google. The marketing department has access to eyes.
Several people who saw the ad before it was pulled described it as immediately and unambiguously reminiscent of KKK rally imagery and the visual language of racial terror. One observer, writing on social media, noted that they had identified the problem in approximately four seconds, which is roughly the same amount of time it takes to tie a Chuck Taylor, a process the shoe was designed to make simple.
Converse has not released the names of the individuals who approved the campaign, nor the name of the external agency if one was involved, nor the number of rounds of internal review the image passed through before publication. What they have released is the word "unsettling," applied to their own output, by themselves, after the fact.
The timeline, as best as it can be reconstructed: someone thought of the ad, someone made the ad, someone reviewed the ad, someone approved the ad, someone published the ad, the public saw the ad, and then Converse saw the ad and found it deeply unsettling.
The shoes retail for $65 and are available in thirty-two colorways, none of which required an apology.
The story we are making fun of: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/converse-ad-lynching-kkk-imagery/