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Archive for ‘Politics’

The Rise of Evil Photoshop

July 30, 2019

Photoshop isn’t always bad, I tell myself as I open CNN and notice that the latest news involve Trump appearing in front of a doctored Presidential seal featuring a Russian-styled two-headed eagle holding some golf clubs. Given it was for a conservative student summit, apparently it was all a mistake thanks to time crunch, but heads rolled and I laughed. Photoshop is a fun program. For many young designers, it’s usually their first introduction to Adobe Creative Suite — in design school, everyone knew how to use it. There are always funny Photoshopping events that run on Kotaku and other sites. That being said, it’s often used for evil or outright illegal purposes.

If you’ve been following the news, you might have seen that certain people thought it would be funny to make an app which auto-undresses women. Just women, mind you. If a guy’s picture was put into the app, it just added boobs to it. Naturally, the app promptly went viral, because there are a lot of evil bastards in the world. Via Vice:

“We created this project for users’ entertainment months ago,” he wrote in a statement attached to a tweet. “We thought we were selling a few sales every month in a controlled manner… We never thought it would become viral and we would not be able to control traffic.”

When I spoke to Alberto in an email Wednesday, he said that he had grappled with questions of morality and ethical use of this app. “Is this right? Can it hurt someone?” he said he asked himself. “I think that what you can do with DeepNude, you can do it very well with Photoshop (after a few hours of tutorial),” he said. If the technology is out there, he reasoned, someone would eventually create this.

Since then, according to the statement, he’s decided that he didn’t want to be the one responsible for this technology.

“We don’t want to make money this way,” the statement said. “Surely some copies of DeepNude will be shared on the web, but we don’t want to be the ones to sell it.” He claimed that he’s just a “technology enthusiast,” motivated by curiosity and a desire to learn. This is the same refrain the maker of deepfakes gave Motherboard in December 2017: that he was just a programmer with an interest in machine learning. But as the subsequent rise of fake revenge porn created using deepfakes illustrated, tinkering using women’s bodies is a damaging, sometimes life-destroying venture for the victims of “enthusiasts.”

“The world is not yet ready for DeepNude,” the statement concluded. But as these victimizing algorithms and apps show, there is no simple solution for technology like DeepNudes, and the societal attitudes that erase women’s bodily autonomy and consent.

There are a few takeaways from this. Firstly, I think it’s hilarious that Alberto thought he was creating an app “motivated by curiosity and a desire to learn” when it could destroy the lives of women with fake revenge porn. It’s either disingenuous — an “Uh oh, I now realize I could be sued for this!” or extremely ignorant, a “I’m so privileged I didn’t realize this might be a problem” thing. Secondly, it’s true that anyone with Photoshop could do what DeepNude does. If you pirate or buy Photoshop and if you invest time learning how to use the app (It WILL take more than a few hours), you can indeed create fake nude images that you could spread around to get someone fired / hurt them enough to drive them to depression or suicide / worse. Not to mention that anything that gets on the internet will likely stay on the internet.

What Can Victims of Evil Photoshop Do?

Depending on what the problem is, there might be a legal recourse. Many countries have a revenge porn law on the books. In Australia, there’s both a civil and criminal recourse:

“When we’ve spoken with people who’ve been individual victims of this type of behaviour — which is terrible behaviour, obviously — what they say is what they really want is some ability to really quickly compel that person to stop doing it and to compel people who’ve received it to take it down if it’s posted on Facebook or to remove it if it’s been texted or emailed to someone,” Porter told 6PR on Thursday afternoon.

“And so we’ve set up this civil penalty regime, which basically allows for this really quick take-down, if you like, of that type of posting. In addition to which, we’ve looked at the existing offences and we’ve toughened them up, so that it will now be the case that if you send an image which we have defined as a private sexual image of someone and you do that in a way that’s unreasonable — including, obviously, consideration as to whether or not the person consented — then you can face a penalty of five years.

“If you do that and you’ve been the subject of three or more of these civil penalty orders — which is the regime that sits underneath it — then you can be guilty of an offence with a penalty up to seven years.”

For everything else, things are more complicated. Deep fakes, or computer-generated replicas of a person saying or doing things they hadn’t said, already exist. In May 2018, a Belgian political party, Socialistische Partij Anders, or sp.a, created a deep fake video of Trump purportedly offering climate change advice to the people of Belgium. They’d assumed that the poor quality of the fake would alert people to the fact that it was a parody video. Naturally, it didn’t. The video went viral and sp.a went into damage control. If even a small-scale deep fake could damage our already fragile news systems, it could do worse. Via the Guardian:

Citron and Chesney are not alone in these fears. In April, the film director Jordan Peele and BuzzFeed released a deep fake of Barack Obama calling Trump a “total and complete dipshit” to raise awareness about how AI-generated synthetic media might be used to distort and manipulate reality. In September, three members of Congress sent a letter to the director of national intelligence, raising the alarm about how deep fakes could be harnessed by “disinformation campaigns in our elections”.

The specter of politically motivated deep fakes disrupting elections is at the top of Citron’s concerns. “What keeps me awake at night is a hypothetical scenario where, before the vote in Texas, someone releases a deep fake of Beto O’Rourke having sex with a prostitute, or something,” Citron told me. “Now, I know that this would be easily refutable, but if this drops the night before, you can’t debunk it before serious damage has spread.”

The problem, the article noted, wasn’t even whether people could or could not easily ID whether a video was fake, or if there was tech that could tell if it was fake:

Indeed, as the fake video of Trump that spread through social networks in Belgium earlier this year demonstrated, deep fakes don’t need to be undetectable or even convincing to be believed and do damage. It is possible that the greatest threat posed by deep fakes lies not in the fake content itself, but in the mere possibility of their existence.

This is a phenomenon that scholar Aviv Ovadya has called “reality apathy”, whereby constant contact with misinformation compels people to stop trusting what they see and hear. In other words, the greatest threat isn’t that people will be deceived, but that they will come to regard everything as deception.

Recent polls indicate that trust in major institutions and the media is dropping. The proliferation of deep fakes, Ovadya says, is likely to exacerbate this trend.

In other words, no, there’s nothing much we can do to prevent the increasing sophistication of evil Photoshop and its kin. It’s all very well to ask people to apply an extra-healthy dose of cynicism and scepticism to anything that appears too good to be true, but in today’s time-sensitive world, that’s a hard ask.

A Retouching Law

Altering images to remove small flaws is nothing new. We do it ourself — retouching images to make them more beautiful. I’ve worked before in a studio with mostly fashion clients where they’d regularly lengthen the legs, lengthen the neck, change the hair, the nails — all in post-production. The “It can all be fixed in post” attitude is filtered in from design school. A classmate once told me in third year that while in first year he would have reshot an image with an error in the set, in third year it was already just easier to erase it in post rather than fiddle with cameras and lighting.

When retouching is taken to extremes, however, that’s what I’d call Strangely Socially Acceptable Evil Photoshop. Look at the image above. It’s of the same model: Filippa Hamilton. See the problem? The image on the left drew criticism over its alteration to impossible body standards.

The Rise of Evil Photoshop

Such standards cause lasting damage or worse on people. In 2007, Hila Elmaliach, a well-known model, died of complications from anorexia at age 34. She was 5’8, and weighed less than 22kg at her death. She’d developed eating disorders when she’d become a model at 13 years old. The American Medical Association also released a statement in 2011 about image alteration:

“The appearance of advertisements with extremely altered models can create unrealistic expectations of appropriate body image. In one image, a model’s waist was slimmed so severely, her head appeared to be wider than her waist. We must stop exposing impressionable children and teenagers to advertisements portraying models with body types only attainable with the help of photo editing software.”

Israel has now passed legislation requiring models to have a BMI of at least 18.5, and there’s legislation in the books about retouching in some countries. Via Pixelz:

In France, a law that went into effect in October of 2017 requires a “photographie retouchée” label on photos that have been digitally altered to make a model’s silhouette narrower or wider; it also requires an every other year health exam for models, to medically certify they are healthy enough to work.

Getty images has now banned “any creative content depicting models whose body shapes have been retouched to make them look thinner or larger,” and there’s also been celebrity backlash on the issue:

The Things We Do

People have less and less of an appetite for extremely retouched stuff. American Eagle’s lingerie line, Aerie, had a campaign celebrating women of all body types:

It resulted in a 20% increase in sales in 2015. And of course, there’s Dove’s heavy push towards body positivity, in award-winning ads that have raised the profile of its products. So how much retouching (if any) is OK, and how much is not? In our opinion, retouching minor things like dirt, temporary blemishes, lighting and such is fine. These edits don’t fundamentally change what the image is, they just change the basic presentation. Respect the model and respect your audience, and as with every ad/marketing content out there, create it while trying to do no evil. That’s the best advice we can put forward in this day and age. Want to know more? Get in touch.

Image by Alex Wong / Getty Images / as seen on CNN

The Restaurant Pay Reckoning

July 24, 2019
george calombaris restaurant pay

“I wish I could steal $7 million dollars and only get fined $200,000,” said a friend of mine when the scandal broke. If you’ve been on the news or Aussie Twitter recently, you might have seen that George Calombaris, one of the judges on the popular reality TV cooking competition Masterchef Australia and restauranteur of Press Club, Gazi, Hellenic Republic and others — has been fined a relative pittance for wage theft. Ironically, on the day of the finale, as activists were trying to get the #MasterTheft hashtag trending, news broke that all three judges wouldn’t be returning for 2020. Their pay negotiations had fallen through, apparently. Despite currently being on million-dollar salaries, they’d asked for a pay raise of 40%. Twitter was briefly overstimulated:

I confess I’ve tried every one of George’s restaurants, even the Press Club, which is probably the most pretentious restaurant I’ve ever been to. If you know me, you’d know that’s a real achievement. Yes, it was more pretentious even than Attica, which when I visited during the first year of its opening, had a little print-out essay of Ben Shewry’s “food philosophy” that you had to read before looking at the menu, where near the end you’re chivvied out into the freezing night and made to walk around the tiny backyard garden poking at herbs. More pretentious than Michelin restaurants in Europe, or even Quintessence in Tokyo, whose menu is literally a blank slate that’s passed to you at the start of the meal. In the Press Club, my guest and I were shown a basket of potatoes still in their jackets. “Cool,” we said, puzzled. “Now the kitchen will transform the potatoes,” announced the serving staff. “Ok,” we said. At the Press Club, your seats are against windows that look down into the kitchen. We watched the serving staff take the potatoes to the kitchen, where sauce was slathered on top. It was served as it was.

We laughed then, but now that I’m aware of the wage theft, I kinda understand.

Free Labour and a Fine Dining Restaurant

It’s now Rockpool Group’s turn to be hit by the wage scandal, before which it was Vue de Monde. To be honest, we’d be completely unsurprised if every high-end restaurant in Australia is underpaying its staff. After all, underpaying — or not even paying — staff has been a staple of fine dining restaurants for a long time. The latter is called ‘staging’, a sort-of free labour internship that is the backbone of fine dining across the world. Via Eater:

What is unfair, underneath the veneer of awards, and the steady flow of international reservation requests they come with, is an ugly economic reality. Because many of these temples of culinary artistry cannot function without the work of stagiaires, their unpaid labor force.

A stage (pronounced: stajh, taken from the French word for “trainee”) is like a cooking internship, and the practice is much more common in elite, destination restaurants than local faves. Some cooks do this for a few days, but often the unpaid work lasts for weeks or months; depending on the kitchen, a stage might see themselves chopping up produce for mise en place or running entire stations during a night’s dinner service. Ostensibly, a cook who has already been in the field a few years, is staging to learn, to absorb new skills and knowledge from the kitchen’s full-time staff — because to be the best, you’ve got to learn from the best. I know a chef who staged at the French Laundry in California, and he doesn’t regret the unpaid, 14-hour days for a minute. It made him who he is. And for those who are able to do this, the experience is figuratively priceless. But in a literal sense, it does have a cost.

“Pursuing your dream and doing whatever it takes to work for the best restaurant, you put up any sacrifice,” says Abigail Ainsworth, a Toronto filmmaker currently shooting a documentary, tentatively titled Stage, about staging in the world’s best restaurants. “We’ve met people who sell their cars, break up with loved ones, really do whatever it takes to live their dream and work for these chefs.”

[…]

In 2015, when Noma was ranked at number three, the Guardian reported that the Copenhagen restaurant employed about 25 paid cooks, with another 30 unpaid stagiaires. A memoir from a former stagiaire, published in Los Angeles Magazine, described 17-hour days. When El Bulli was in the number one spot, I interviewed Ferran Adrià, who told me that he had 25 stagiaires, a workforce that outnumbered his paid staff.

It’s all very well to claim that staging is going to cooking school for free, but unpaid labour is illegal across many countries for a good reason. Besides, people who can afford to stage would themselves be a privileged few — people who don’t have medical debts to pay off, for example, or families to support. That’ll contribute to a lessening of diversity across the industry, which you can see in the spread of the Best 50 Restaurants list this year too. It lauded itself for being “female-forward“, when there were only 5 women-led restaurants in the top 50, and there’s still, hilariously, a “Best Female Chef” award, as though women can’t compete at the same level for Best Chef.

Free staging isn’t legal in Australia — but underpaying staff in general while overworking them is still the go. When Ben Shewry of Attica implemented the 48-hour working week for his staff, it was lauded:

“48-hour work weeks at a top 50 restaurant is amazing – this should be the Australian standard.”

However, not everyone is receptive to a shorter work week – chefs included. Dan Puskas of Sydney restaurant Sixpenny tried to implement a four-day system six months ago, but failed.

“I pitched it to our staff and none of them wanted to do it,” he says. “We’re lucky here because we don’t do Sunday dinner and we close Mondays and Tuesdays so our chefs get Sunday nights off and then two week days.”

“There’s this old idea that if you want to survive in this industry, you have to work these crazy hours. Maybe it’s exaggerated but on the other hand, we couldn’t afford to be open if we worked eight hours a day. We’d need to double the chefs, our prices would go up and we’d have no customers,” says Puskas.

It’s a hard life. We can only hope the Attica staff are also being paid what they’re worth. The last time I was in the restaurant, the chef’s essay was gone, but the garden walk remained.

Masterchef 2020

To be honest, I don’t particularly care that three middle-aged guys have lost a job that they held with intermittent success for 11 years. I used to love watching Masterchef. I learned how to quarter a chicken watching the show, among other things. I’ve gone to restaurants or tried bakeries because they featured on the show. I wish it the best. Unlike a lot of reality TV out there, much of Masterchef is feel-good TV where you can actually learn something. Yet every year, having to watch George struggle to eat spicy food got less and less funny. And each time the judges (other than Matt Preston the food critic) was faced with something beyond the norm, I usually held my breath to see if they were going to handle it badly.

Notwithstanding the top 10 for this year, the show has become more diverse over the years — last year’s winner was Singapore-born Sashi Cheliah. It was an absolute trip to turn on free-to-air Australian TV five days a week and listen to the accent from the country of my birth boom out over everyone else (Sashi used to be a police officer and it shows). TV is changing. This year, one of the most-watched shows on Netflix was Ava Duvernay’s incredible When They See Us, about the Central Park Five. Black Panther and Crazy Rich Asians have made silly money at the box office. The new 007 is Lashana Lynch.

Here’s hoping that Masterchef Australia and Channel 10 will see the way the wind is blowing, and bring in judges that reflect the huge variety of food that Australia is now home to. It’s a new world now, hungry for new things. To Matt and Gary, thanks for the entertainment, even though it’s been 11 years and I’m still not entirely sure why Gary was even there (does he even have a restaurant?). As to George… pay your staff more, man. And the potatoes were weird.

Image from 7news.

Long Live Avocado Toast

June 29, 2019
avocado toast

The avocado toast thing just will not die.

In May, Financial Counselling Australia researcher Mia Shelton said at an FCA conference in Melbourne that “Financial difficulties for young people are very real and it’s not just about avocado on toast.” It’s a cutesy little reference thrown out for the conference attendees, who we presume are older Boomers who think smashed avo on toast is literally just a $20+ extravagance consisting of mashed avo on naked white bread. The Australian Financial Review went one step further earlier in 2018, calling young professionals the “smashed avocado generation”. I can’t even look at a smashed avo item on a brunch menu nowadays and wonder if I’m failing at life by incrementally giving up my chance to yoke myself to a crippling mortgage over a property in a bubble that’s expected to pop at any moment. It’s almost enough to make you ragequit avo brunches and stick to baked eggs.

Not.

Why is Avocado Toast So God Damned Expensive? (Hint: It’s not)

Every time I see a small-l liberal American on social media post about how expensive avocado toast is in Melbourne I want to flip a table. How much is your minimum wage again? I’ll wait while you look it up in your state. Let me tell you ours. As of writing this article, the national minimum wage in Australia is $18.93 per hour. We’re not going to get into the details of whether or not that is a living wage in various bits of Australia given rising rent and the cost of living (Answer: It’s not, but you can read about Labor’s failed plan to change our minimum wage into a living wage here), but it’s a sight better than the horror show of a system that certain other countries have, where wait staff have to survive off tips and therefore constantly endure shit like harassment from customers. Australia isn’t perfect, but the minimum wage is one reason why our avo toast costs more than yours.

A brunch place in Sydney, Sticky Fingers, was also asked about the cost. Their answer was:

“Avocados are retailing at $48 per box and there are 22 in a box which makes it just over $2 an avocado. Our avo on toast is $15. It comes on two slices of sourdough with goats cheese, truffle honey and pistachio nuts. We put in half to one avocado per dish depending on size of avocado so 13 per cent of the base cost of our avo on toast dish is attributed to avocado. When you consider the cost of other ingredients, the base cost of an avocado is extremely high in comparison.” […] Then there is the cost of the labour, which is estimated to make up about 30 per cent of the price — you need someone to order the avocados, prep the avocado and toast, take the order, serve the order, and then clean the dish it was served on. Rounding out the cost are other overheads (eg rent and utilities) along with miscellaneous expenses such as paper supplies (menu), printing, advertising, accounting, insurance, flowers, cleaning services and a whole raft of other expenses that go into running a restaurant.

There. Labour, rent, and such aside… I’m not sure what people think avocado toast is meant to be, but in a good cafe in Melbourne, it’s often very cheffy. Here are some examples:

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Smashed avo vibes 💚🥑

A post shared by Pillar of Salt (@pillarofsaltcafe) on

How Did This Stoush Start Anyway?

We can’t actually blame American twitter for everything. The avo-toast-is-preventing-you-from-a-mortgage terrible idea was actually from an Australian. *GASP*, I know, we were the arbiters of our own laughing stock status. More accurately, the latest meme started in 2017 from Aussie millionaire and property mogul Tim Gurner, who said:

“When I was trying to buy my first home, I wasn’t buying smashed avocado for $19 and four coffees at $4 each.”

Sure, Mr Gurner. We’ll overlook the fact that your parents could send you to Carey Grammar and you could borrow $34,000 from your grandfather for your first business. A lot of these “self-made” people looking down on the so-called avo toast millennials really need to take a more careful look at their privilege. And besides, as the twitterverse pointed out:

This wasn’t the first time the avo toast paradigm has been fired out at the younger generation from an Aussie millionaire. In 2016m Bernard Salt, KPMG-partner-turned-The Australian-columnist, complained:

I have seen young people order smashed avocado with crumbled feta on five-grain toasted bread at $22 a pop and more. I can afford to eat this for lunch because I am middle-aged and have raised my family. But how can young people afford to eat like this? Shouldn’t they be economising by eating at home? How often are they eating out? Twenty-two dollars several times a week could go towards a deposit on a house.

You’d think that being a partner in KPMG would’ve allowed Salt to run the math between the cost of toast and a deposit on a house with current Aussie housing prices. Like Gurner, the article was widely mocked on Australian social media. We remember here a few of our favourites:

tldr: just eat what you want, smashed avo generation. You’re likely already better at saving than you think anyway. The housing bust is upon us and daily news remains a depressing read. In this climate, we all deserve to treat ourselves now and then. In other words: time for some avo toast.

Ethical Advertising

June 19, 2019
ethical advertising

I’m in a movie theatre, waiting for a film to start. My friends and I tend to watch blockbusters because we’re easily entertained. With the world slowly burning down around us, it’s nice to spend a couple of hours every weekend pretending that tech billionaires would invest their money into armoured flight suits and personally attempt to save the world. The first few ads are familiar, and again make me extremely curious about Desi Dhaba’s advertising strategy. How does a smallish restaurant on Flinders Street always seem to pop up on the cinema ads at Hoyts Melbourne Central? Are they just buying ad space in one cinema? Distressed space? How much is their budget? While secretly praying that whoever wrote the copy for the ad would never find matching socks forever more, a slick new ad pops on. It’s about “clean” coal.

Wow.

There is, in case you haven’t realized, no such thing as “clean” coal. I could go on an hours-long rant about this, but to sum it up in a way that involves less invective:

The best of the new breed of plants can reduce emissions by up to 40 per cent compared to some older-style coal-fired power stations, according to the International Energy Agency. But to call this “clean coal” is misleading. The new generation plants are less damaging to the environment, but they are not clean.

Even the best of the high-efficiency, low-emission plants emit far more carbon into the atmosphere than gas-fired power stations. Coal, by nature, is not clean. Aside from releasing CO2, which contributes to global warming, burning coal releases sooty particulates that can cause cancer and respiratory problems, sulphur and nitrogen, which contribute to acid rain, and other toxic chemicals.

Advertising, I like to think, gets a bad rap. There’s good work that gets done. Ads that can help drive change in ways both large or incremental. Often, though, there’s also stuff like this.

Nothing Is Real Anyway

Everything you see in an ad is fake. Cats unerringly choosing a certain brand of catfood? The other bowls probably had a layer of petroleum on it or something. That happy family you see on screen? Probably not remotely related. That delicious shot of fried chicken falling through the air? Possibly CG. That huge, stacked, fluffy McDonalds burger? Stuffed with tissues and pins and glazed. Not convinced? There’s tons of vids out there about the tricks of the trade, like so:

Everything’s more glamorous after post-production. Advertising is the art of pushing a better, more idealised world to a customer in the hope that they’d part with some money for whatever our client’s selling. With this in mind, does it matter whether the ad is presenting a set of alternative facts? The whole ad itself is technically an alternative fact, isn’t it? We like to think so. We think there’s a difference between a little lie — like a raw chicken painted to look like a roast chicken — and a big lie, aka that coal is a fuel source that doesn’t damage the environment.

Define the Thing

What is ethical advertising, you might ask. Just ads that don’t lie? If all ads lie in some way, what is an acceptable non-truth? I would say that ethical advertising:

  • Is effective: aka it meets its key objectives and has decent ROI
  • Doesn’t involve much moral compromise in concept
  • Doesn’t have a fundamental message that is untrue
  • Doesn’t create, perpetuate, or encourage harmful situations or outcomes
  • Doesn’t break the law

Basically, to sum it up, ethical advertising does the thing that Google used to have as their brand message: it does no evil.

Ethical Advertising for Profit

It’s easy to make ethical advertising when you work for something like a nonprofit, you’d say. What if you’re shilling a fast food burger? You can’t exactly write the truth into the ad. Everyone knows that McDonald’s burgers don’t look as good in real life as they do in an ad. To what extent can you stretch reality without it being unethical?

Clients do increasingly care about messaging in advertising and branding. Putting political advertising aside, which is a whole ‘nother kettle of terrible fish, you’ve probably already seen the occasional backlash against brands coming from both sides of the political spectrum whenever there’s a particularly egregious lie or message. There was the pushback against the body-shaming “Bikini Ready” ads by Protein World in 2015, for example. Or the recent, laughable pushback against positive masculinity ads by Gillette. Overall, however, clients are more willing to support brands that push social conscience or environmental responsibility. Via the Guardian:

The numbers add up. Neilsen’s global retail analysis shows increased sales for brands with sustainability claims on packaging or active marketing of CSR efforts. What’s more, 55% of global online consumers across 60 countries say they are willing to pay more for products and services provided by companies that are committed to positive social and environmental impact. On top of this, The 2015 Brand Footprint report published by Kantar Worldpanel shows that brands with a social conscience grew in popularity, Dove among them.

It’s not a stretch of the imagination to see where the wind is blowing: towards more socially conscious, “authentic” advertising. The messaging is far more likely to stick in the right way if it’s true. It’ll also attract positive attention to the brand, which would enforce existing customer loyalty and maybe even reach new customers.

Sex, Money, Puppies

Several years ago I attended a talk where a brand guru said that there are three things that easily sell: sex, money, puppies. Maybe not all at once. There are indications that this isn’t necessarily entirely true:

A classic study conducted by Baker and Churchill in 1977 found that advertising models’ physical attractiveness increased viewers’ attention as well as their positive evaluations of the ads. But at the same time, it found that sexual content in ads did not affect respondents’ deeper cognitions, thus rendering physical attraction ineffective in gaining the target market’s acceptance of the advertising message.

Similarly, Parker and Furnham in 2007 realized that sexual ad content had no effect on viewers’ abilities to recall details of television commercials. The study also found that women recalled ads without sexual content better than they did sexualized ads.

A more recent study conducted in July at Ohio State University discovered an even more conflicting effect. Violent and sexual content in ads again succeeded in grabbing attention, but it also overshadowed other important aspects of the marketing effort, including the product being promoted. As a result, the researchers concluded that sex and violence in ads actually impeded product memory and lessened purchase intentions.

Sexualised advertising that objectifies people doesn’t work, so why is it still ubiquitous? Because of mistaken assumptions that it sells. We should all take a closer look at what we think we know, even as we figure out what we think we understand about the campaigns we create and their consequences. Curious and need a chat? Get in touch. In the meantime, bring on the puppy ads.

Pulling Ads in Protest

June 5, 2019
Pulling Ads off YouTube

Every morning, after I feed the cats, make breakfast, I open my MacBook and curse myself. “Twitter,” I say, “what’s the worst thing that happened while I was asleep?”

This problem with YouTube has been brewing for some time. It’s easily correctable on YouTube’s part — they just need to turn off the Recommended feature for videos involving kids, which their algorithm can already pick out. However, since that feature is the main driver of ad dollars to videos and to YouTube, they won’t. Yet another reminder that Google, YouTube’s parent company, left its ‘Do No Evil’ corporate philosophy behind a long time ago.

Sounds familiar? You’re probably a news junkie. The realization that predators have been using the YouTube comment section of home videos to guide other predators to the videos was previously written about a few months ago. Advertisers like started pulling (or considering pulling) their ads:

Nestlé, Epic Games and other major brands said on Wednesday that they had stopped buying advertisements on YouTube after their ads appeared on children’s videos where pedophiles had infiltrated the comment sections.

The companies acted after a YouTube user posted a video this week to point out this behavior. For the most part, the videos targeted by pedophiles did not violate YouTube’s rules and were innocent enough — young girls doing gymnastics, playing Twister or stretching — but the videos became overrun with suggestive remarks directed at the children.

The YouTube user, Matt Watson, came under criticism for having started an “adpocalypse” — a plunge in ad revenue — by publicising the issue instead of reporting the matter to YouTube’s own tools, even though combing through the thousands of home videos to manually report every comment was going to be a gargantuan task for a human. Months later, with the problem still unchecked and YouTube still intent on keeping its moneymaking algorithm despite the risks, it’s hard to see whether Matt’s approach had really worked — or if there was anything else he could have done.

Pulling Ads — The Beginning

Companies have often dropped ads or sponsorship for something they considered toxic. This hasn’t always worked. Floyd Mayweather, the boxer, remained one of the highest paid by revenue sports people in the world even without sponsorships. Nike was also recently revealed to have dropped sportswomen from its sponsorship after they got pregnant, and only committed to ending the penalties after an op-ed on the NYT brought backlash on the brand.

The most recent and well-known example of weaponising the process as a form of political protest came, perhaps unsurprisingly, from a freelance advertising copywriter from San Francisco. Matt Rivitz was incensed after the 2016 elections. In particular, he was angry with Steve Bannon of Breitbart news, an American conservative propaganda “news” site. He created an anonymous Twitter account, which he called Sleeping Giants. It encouraged people to take screenshots of ads appearing on Breitbart and forward them to brands, which were taken aback by images of their ads appearing next to headlines like “Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy”. Hundreds of brands responded by blacklisting the site, and Sleeping Giants added Fox News to its purview, managing to remain anonymous until Matt was unmasked against his wishes by the Daily Caller, another conservative site. Via the New York Times:

“The way it happened sucks, but I’m super proud of this thing and of all the people who worked on it and all the people who followed it,” Mr. Rivitz said in his first interview since his involvement in the account was revealed. “We’re happy that we made advertisers think a little bit and realize what they’re supporting.” […]

“I was pretty amazed at the stuff they were printing, and my next thought, being in advertising, was, ‘Who is knowingly supporting this stuff?’” he said. “I thought maybe it would be two to three companies, and I quickly realized within a couple hours it was all placed programmatically.”

Mr. Rivitz was referring to the automated systems that place most online ads and tend to target consumers based on who they are, rather than which site they are visiting.

Sleeping Giants intends to make “bigotry and sexism less profitable”.

“People can use their free speech to say whatever they want and print whatever they want, and that’s what makes this country great,” Mr. Rivitz said, “but it doesn’t mean they need to get paid for it, especially by an advertiser who didn’t know they were paying for it.”

Careful Where You Advertise

It’s easy to pull ads from one particular site, but working on a blacklist system can mean that your ad will eventually just reappear on another site that doesn’t align with your brand values. Instead of trying to blacklist sites, it’s probably better for you to work from a trusted set of whitelisted sites, manually verified. You can build a nice whitelist just by checking out the most visited sites on the Internet and working from there.

Pulling ads from entire platforms is another kettle of fish. Not running ads on major platforms like YouTube as a form of protest isn’t something that a lot of brands can afford to do as part of their digital strategy. After all, YouTube’s owned by Google — do you then stop buying AdWords as well? Do you stop buying ads on Facebook and Instagram for all the dodgy things that Facebook has done? With the amount of noise out there, small brands with less clout in the marketplace will have to consider their digital strategies more closely than major brands who can generate news just from the act of boycotting YouTube.

Need more information? Need help with your digital placement strategy? Get in touch.

Image from Bizztor.

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