Intent can cancel cancel culture

Ashley Regan
By Ashley Regan | 22 May 2023
 
Initiative's Culture Shock: Grey Matters

The canceling of a person, organisation, product, brand and anything else in between can be avoided with intent, according to media agency Initiative's panel Culture Shock: Grey Matters.

On stage at Nine’s Big Ideas Store Initiative gave a platform to a talent, a brand and a publisher to share their experiences of navigating the risk of being cancelled with the risk of something worse - becoming bland. 

Karl Stefanović, Australian television presenter, said while there is such a thing as bad PR, intent matters more in a world of cancel culture.

"The public are really good at reading whether or not a person is genuine. It can take a lot of years for the public to make their minds up and get used to the ebbs and flows of that person in media.

"When I started on The Today Show my boss at the time said it will take Australia 10 fucking years to get used to my weird personality and it has taken a long time.

"And now the public knows that I never seek trouble, but sometimes it finds me in strange places."

At a brand level Eric Thomson, global marketing director for Pernod Ricard Winemakers, believes media companies need to also - like talent - overtly show intent.

"People have always known what they can expect from Ben and Jerry's, a brand which has always pushed the boundaries of being really progressive. 

"Where as with the recent Bud Light campaign, people weren't expecting them to delve into anything [relating to transness]. As a result, they alienated a whole bunch of people and it shocked everybody because it wasn't what consumers expect from them."

As another example Sam Geer, national managing director Initiative, said while in the short-term the Balenciaga kids marketing campaign hurt the brand, sales have already started to bounce back because similarly that brand is known to always push the boundaries.

"It's almost unfathomable to know how many levels of approval that campaign would have to go - to get anything off the ground is difficult for a brand as global and as iconic as that."

While undoubtedly social media has played a huge role in creating cancel culture, editorial clickbait is often thrown under the bus, but is it really at fault of reporters?

Josephine Rozenberg-Clarke, head of editorial at Pedestrian.TV, said scandals selling media is not a new thing and cancel culture is not a problem created by digital media.

"When I first started working at Pedestrian in 2017, Facebook would cut off headline after 75 characters, we had a very small space to get the story across and get people interested. Now we have 94 characters, a little bit more space to play with, but it's hard to fit nuance into that.

"Nuance is important but it is hard for editorial because we don't have the room for context."

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