In the matter of international advertising, it has long been understood that what reads innocently in Copenhagen may land quite differently in Cleveland. Converse, the Boston-based sneaker brand now residing within Nike's considerable portfolio, has just received an expensive reminder of this principle — twice in eleven days, which suggests less an accident than a process.
The first image, featuring Karina of the K-pop group aespa, who serves as the brand's global ambassador, was read by American audiences as evoking a lynching. The second, a collaboration with Palmes, a Danish lifestyle brand, appeared on Converse Mexico's Instagram and reportedly also on the brand's Malaysian account: a man on a ladder near a tree, sneakers held overhead. Converse has apologized.
The underlying architecture of the problem is not mysterious. A campaign of this scope involves a Boston headquarters, a creative partner in Denmark, an ambassador mid-world-tour in Korea, and market channels across Latin America and Southeast Asia. The number of hands touching the work multiplies; the number of people who feel personally accountable for its reception divides accordingly.
No chief marketing officer reviews every image shipped in every market. (This would require either cloning or a considerably reduced need for sleep.) The concept deck that receives sign-off in a conference room and the specific frame that goes live on Instagram in Mexico City are, as a practical matter, two different artifacts. A white triangle means nothing in most of the world. In America it means a Klan hood.
What is notable is not that such images were created — international teams working without shared cultural memory will inevitably produce them — but that they cleared whatever review existed. Consumer testing data, when it exists at all, is often siloed by market; concerns raised by a small number of respondents in one geography can be dismissed as statistical noise before anyone with broader context sees the work.
The solution is not complicated, merely inconvenient: test earlier, test across borders, and adopt what one observer has called a "one-flag rule" — if any respondent in any market names violence or historical trauma unprompted, escalate immediately to human review, regardless of the mean.
Converse, which has been making sneakers since 1908 and has been part of Nike since 2003, will presumably survive this. The question is whether the machinery that produced the error will be rebuilt, or merely apologized around.
Original story published in adweek.com: "Too Many Cooks Spoiled Converse's Global Ad Rollout"