I’ve been trying to figure out why cancel culture is so powerful. If only ~7% of people identify as pro social justice, why are social media platforms so freely bending to their will? Surely it’s not out of the goodness of their hearts, what is the commercial motive? I don’t buy the idea that it is simply a marketing stunt. Afaict a pro-SJ stance does not make a company look much more favorable at this point.
For context, Facebook is the social media company that has been most reluctant to be political, and apparently this is really making them bleed financially.
Why are marketing people so willing to go out of their way to do “the right thing” instead of the profitable thing? Is this something cultural? Some more digging showed that the NAACP and the ADL are leading this charge of boycotting Facebook, but I don’t know what to make of that.
For context, Facebook is the social media company that has been most reluctant to be political, and apparently this is really making them bleed financially.
I added up the numbers in the first article and got around $634m of total 2018 ad spend, vs 2019 facebook revenue of 70700bn—less than 1%. Many of those companies only say they are ‘pausing’ or ‘for July’, rather than stopping. Finally, a company that was re-considering its facebook ad spend for unrelated reasons might want to frame it as a moral stance.
Perhaps principle-agent problems are at play; individual ideologues put SJ ahead of corporate profitability, and the much larger number of ordinary people are afraid of being bullied so do not speak out. But this is obviously not a full explanation.
I’ve been trying to figure out why cancel culture is so powerful. If only ~7% of people identify as pro social justice, why are social media platforms so freely bending to their will? Surely it’s not out of the goodness of their hearts, what is the commercial motive? I don’t buy the idea that it is simply a marketing stunt. Afaict a pro-SJ stance does not make a company look much more favorable at this point.
But then I found this:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/26/business/media/Facebook-advertising-boycott.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/09/business/media/facebook-advertisers-trump-zuckerberg.html
For context, Facebook is the social media company that has been most reluctant to be political, and apparently this is really making them bleed financially.
Why are marketing people so willing to go out of their way to do “the right thing” instead of the profitable thing? Is this something cultural? Some more digging showed that the NAACP and the ADL are leading this charge of boycotting Facebook, but I don’t know what to make of that.
I added up the numbers in the first article and got around $634m of total 2018 ad spend, vs 2019 facebook revenue of 70700bn—less than 1%. Many of those companies only say they are ‘pausing’ or ‘for July’, rather than stopping. Finally, a company that was re-considering its facebook ad spend for unrelated reasons might want to frame it as a moral stance.
Perhaps principle-agent problems are at play; individual ideologues put SJ ahead of corporate profitability, and the much larger number of ordinary people are afraid of being bullied so do not speak out. But this is obviously not a full explanation.