From the Super Bowl and the Grammys to the Oscars, Why Are So Many Ads Suddenly Talking Politics? | What's Sneaking Into Ads ①

From needling the president and brand-new policies to catch the eye, to backing one side's politics to advertise a brand's own stance and values — if people care about it, there seems to be nothing they won't put in an ad.

Nothing right now is more fashionable than talking politics in an ad — just as in 2015, when brands were terrified of missing their best chance to stand up for the gay community.

Commercial advertising chases profit, but it also mirrors its era: it courts what's popular and ends up absorbed into popular culture.

Not every ad is a good ad. But a good one has power. It gets copied, repeated, and it will certainly be argued about.

People rarely agree any more on how to judge an ad. The more useful question is why one kind of ad shows up everywhere at once.

The purpose of a commercial has never changed: to persuade the consumer — or, more bluntly, to win them over. And the best way to push someone to an emotional peak may be to use symbols to build a connection: politics, say, or sex, or feminism.

These are also, beyond question, the best vehicles for showing what a brand believes in. And, inevitably, they carry the risk.

As we said last year when we launched our series Ad Wars (《广告大战》): what we're discussing is advertising, but never only advertising.

As expected, "politics" played an outsized role at this year's Oscars.

Right at the opening, host Jimmy Kimmel "thanked" Trump; plenty of stars wore blue ribbons on their chests in support of the American civil rights movement; and it all peaked at Best Foreign Language Film, when Iranian director Asghar Farhadi won again for The Salesman, after A Separation — though he himself refused to attend the ceremony, in protest of the president's immigration ban.

Every fresh tear in American society pushes Hollywood, the stronghold of the American left, a little further left. But at last night's Oscars, Hollywood wasn't the only one eager to talk about the political situation. So were the advertisers who usually stay neutral.

Cadillac said something startling in its one-minute ad. Over footage of American civil-rights marches from the 1960s, the narrator says: "We are a nation divided."

Hyatt pointed its camera at "people of color" who get dirty looks while traveling, over the line "What this world needs right now is love."

Audible.com, owned by Amazon, had actor Zachary Quinto read a full passage from 1984. The New York Times — the paper Trump keeps calling failing — ran its first TV ad in a decade: black words flashing by on white, each line starting with "The truth is…". One line in the version that aired during the Oscars read, "The truth is famous people should watch their mouths."

It wasn't only last night's Oscars. From the Super Bowl on February 6 to the Grammys on February 14, in the space of a single month, ads from at least 11 companies talked about politics. Some came from multinationals like Coca-Cola and Nike, others from small brands that made their name on the moment. None of these ads had low view counts; the biggest ran to tens of millions.

ABC, which broadcast the Oscars, priced its ads this year at about US$2.2 million per 30 seconds; a Super Bowl spot went for US$5.5 million per 30 seconds. That expensive, and brands would still rather say nothing about what their products do and spend the whole slot on the wall, 1984 and immigration. In an America that had just come through an election and kept being jolted by Trump, nothing seemed more fashionable than "talking politics."

Historically, a burst this concentrated is rare. From needling the president and brand-new policies to catch the eye, to backing one side's politics to advertise a brand's own stance and values — if people care about it, there seems to be nothing they won't put in an ad.

In China, the closest thing to this spectacle may be the ads for domestic goods that cheered on Double Tenth Day in Shen Bao (《申报》) in the early years of the Republic. "Great Chinese people smoke Great China cigarettes; never for a moment forget our Great China" is, in effect, the same move as Coca-Cola having American citizens of every skin color sing the patriotic anthem "America the Beautiful" in this year's Super Bowl ad.

"There is no situation in which a brand must speak out on a political issue. In almost every case it's a choice, a strategic choice," Denise Sabet, North America general manager of the brand consultancy Landor, told QDaily. To make that choice well, she said, it helps most if the political issue relates directly to the brand's category or its target audience.

Cadillac, with its pure Detroit lineage and a run as the presidential limousine brand going back to the Wilson era, clearly believes it has to care about national affairs more than German or Japanese carmakers do.

For the past three years Cadillac's tagline has been "Dare Greatly," and its US sales fell 3% in 2016 — which, to some degree, brought this ad about. "We have to address the elephant in the room," chief marketing officer Uwe Ellinghaus said in an interview about the ad; he may not have meant only the state of American society. "Cadillac realized it needs to build an emotional connection with buyers." He also stressed that the ad worked hard to avoid taking a party side.

For or against, most brands got the attention they wanted out of this political wave.

Budweiser is the most representative case. Its one-minute Super Bowl ad, "Born the Hard Way," tells the story of its German-born founder, Adolphus Busch, coming to America to chase a brewing dream. An American in the story yells at him: "You don't look like you're from around here. Go home!"

Three weeks after it went up, the ad had 28.11 million views on YouTube, 48,000 likes and 17,000 dislikes. In a comment section 12,314 posts deep, people fought over whether the ad was alluding to the immigration restrictions Trump had signed three days earlier. "Too political!" said the critics.

Budweiser said the ad's concept was locked in last October, before the election results came out, and that it cost nearly US$15 million including production; the company hadn't expected this much controversy. Still, "if I look at the numbers now, this was definitely the right call," Budweiser vice president Ricardo Marques said afterward. "The only question we ask ourselves is, can we do it again next year?"

Small brands, meanwhile, used political opportunism in their ads to make a name overnight. 84 Lumber, an obscure building-materials company in Pennsylvania, became the Super Bowl's other storm center with an ad starring Mexican immigrants: a mother and daughter make a punishing journey to the Mexican border and finally run into the wall Trump had vowed to build. Fox rejected the version 84 Lumber first submitted as "too political" and sent it back for a recut, and Fox's censorship then became part of the marketing itself, something the brand played up heavily. As of now, the full five-minute film uploaded to YouTube has 10.88 million views.

The risk of talking politics in an ad is about the same as the risk of chasing any other hot topic (yesterday, for instance, you probably got endless news alerts about La La Land winning an award and then having it taken back). It's only that political subjects always come with a clearer set of opponents, and a big company has far more to weigh than a small one. A study by Global Strategy Group found that whether a company likes it or not, consumers already assign it a political position, and the industry it's in usually decides whether people think it should be Republican or Democrat. Once you're seen as one party's supporter, consumers on either side like you a little less — because it hints at a kind of inequality: are you really serving everyone?

Starbucks announcing it would hire 10,000 refugees over the next five years is a relatively positive example. It did set off a boycott by a good number of conservatives on Twitter invoking high unemployment, but because Starbucks's target customers are concentrated among liberal urban elites, at least in terms of avoiding risk this was far better than Budweiser offending its loyal customers in the American heartland.

Among all the elements that turn up in advertising, politics is unlike the familiar sex, babies, and cats and dogs: it's hard to trace the first time a commercial ever touched it. But the most successful case is easy to find — Benetton, which made its name by "talking politics."

A bleeding heart; a newborn with its umbilical cord still uncut; the uniform of a soldier killed in the Bosnian war. Religion, AIDS, racial hatred — all of it ran as advertising for this Italian clothing brand, founded in 1965. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, photographer Oliviero Toscani, then Benetton's art director, made a series of ads called "UNITED COLORS OF BENETTON" that gave the brand's brightly colored casualwear a far deeper meaning. "The company grew twenty-fold. By the time I left, Benetton was one of the five most iconic logos in the world."

Oh, and Oliviero Toscani also founded the well-known multicultural magazine COLORS with two other designers. The company behind it was Benetton.

The avant-garde political subjects in those ads shocked the world and helped Benetton expand fast into a global brand, running level with Esprit at the time. But as the topics in Benetton's ads grew more controversial year by year, the content drifted further from the brand itself. In 2011 its Unhate campaign put heads of state and religious leaders on screen kissing, at a total marketing cost of close to 10 million euros. In 2010, Benetton's annual sales were 2.05 billion euros, only 1.5% above the figure a decade earlier. People had gotten used to it.

After a share-price collapse and profit warnings, the Benetton family delisted the company from the Milan stock exchange in 2012.

"It tapped into the whole radical mood of the '80s." That, according to The Guardian, is how Iain R Webb, former editor of Blitz magazine, described Benetton and its advertising. In the 1960s, when the company had just started, Benetton's saturated colors counted as advanced taste amid a sea of gray and navy. Today, color alone is no longer enough to carry sharper and more complicated political views.

Even so, fashion people may still be the group best suited to pasting political slogans on their ads — partly because they share traits with the Hollywood crowd, partly because fashion itself can never quite shake off "rebellion." Look at the latest New York Fashion Week and you'll see that in fashion's eyes it's hard to say which is the point: supporting a political movement, or selling a cool hoodie.

On Valentine's Day, the Italian label DIESEL released its spring/summer 2017 campaign, rewriting the famous antiwar slogan as "Make Love Not Walls": a group of good-looking young people drive a rainbow tank through the ad and smash a wall whose meaning nobody has to be told.

That is the brand's usual style. Twenty-three years ago, after the Clinton administration introduced its "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy on gay service members, DIESEL staged a fake poster of two male sailors kissing to celebrate victory in World War II.

There are already signs that we're getting used to politics in commercials. When the British retailer Sainsbury's shot a 2014 Christmas ad about the 1914 trench truce, people condemned it for disrespecting history and reopening pain. But when Johnnie Walker filmed how islanders on Lesbos helped thousands of refugees in 2016, the short film drew 9.42 million views at once and, for all the commercial motive behind it, was still called "inspiring" by commentators.

The internet's Matthew effect has drained political subjects of the force they once had in advertising. When everyone starts talking about the same thing, a brand hoping to be noticed drowns fast in the noise of the political moment. When Benetton put out those posters in the eighties and nineties, it was the only brand doing it. Now both the potency and the risk of the message have faded — and once your ad about a serious issue does cause a stir, the damage can be worse than it used to be.

This is also why so many ads that touch politics today play it for entertainment, for a joke. Take this hair-care brand making fun of Trump's hair:

"America, we're stuck with bad hair for at least four years. Whether we can make hair great again is now up to you."

Or Ben & Jerry's, riding the legalization of marijuana by threatening to develop a marijuana-flavored ice cream:

In the age of digital media, marketers have worked steadily to turn a brand into an individual you can reach out and touch, with a clear identity you can get behind. And the shift toward content marketing has created room for ads that lay out complicated problems. A likable brand sells more and helps a company recover quickly from a crisis. Tanya Meck, a partner at the PR and market-research firm Global Strategy Group, argues that "a brand's identity and beliefs, to some degree, protect it."

But because distribution channels are just as complicated, brands with split personalities are very common — the work of marketers who can't adapt fast enough to a complicated media environment. And when the issue involves politics and ideology, the consequences of that split personality get much worse.

This same February, Under Armour CEO Kevin Plank was pushed into the center of a public storm for praising President Trump in an interview. More awkward still, the brand's hottest current endorser, NBA player Stephen Curry, came out against him immediately.

We reported the full story earlier, and the risk in it can be quantified exactly: for a company like Under Armour, which is turning into an all-round sports brand and has started selling shoes, Stephen Curry — who helped lift its basketball sales 350% — was fully able to force the brand into an apology.

"There have been a few unstable stretches in American history, but the current political situation is still something we haven't seen before," Susan Moon, senior strategy consultant at Landor US, told QDaily. "Ideological polarization keeps deepening across the country, and it's forcing brands to respond and state a position."

In a sense, the authentic, opinionated marketing that brands have chased in recent years has itself become the problem in this particular environment.

In 2013, the digital advertising outlet DIGIDAY asked five marketing and media people what "authenticity marketing" is. Joe Barbagallo, Volvo's US social media manager, explained: "Authentic marketing means being 'an open book on social media.' Especially when a consumer asks you a question, you have to answer straight." If consumers demand that you take a position on a political issue, things get a little awkward. And if a brand and its endorser don't agree politically, that may be a thornier problem than a luxury house hiring the wrong influencer.

Commercial advertising usually enters contested territory carefully. Culturally, advertising follows rather than leads; most of the time it only discusses questions that have already been settled by "consensus." Consider the growing number of ads promoting women's empowerment: they tend to arrive only after the feminist movement has made gains, or after feminism has already become politically correct.

Some views that once sounded shocking have long since become, in part, the norm. In June 2015, when the US Supreme Court declared same-sex marriage legal, nearly every brand congratulated it — not only because the gay community is large enough, but because an equally large number of supporters pushed businesses to act.

India is a classic example. It has one of the world's youngest populations, 40% of it under 20, and it is also the world's second-largest body of internet users, and of Facebook and Twitter users. KV Sridhar, former chief creative officer at Leo Burnett, told Quartz: "In 30 years in advertising in India, I have never seen waves of ads as bold, or as dominant on social networks, as in the past 10 years."

The anti-gay law hasn't been repealed, but homosexuality stopped being taboo among young Indians long ago, and brand ads that touch the subject often go viral online. You might not guess it, but a Tide detergent ad in the Indian market once set off a national argument about wives' household duties.

Look again now at Benetton's 2015 ad images — men and women in bright clothes shaking hands and embracing — and it all seems quiet and ordinary, without any of the old nerve to shock the world. Benetton chief product officer John Mollanger told the media at the time: "We have grown up, and the world has grown up."

But clearly the world is far from grown up, and Benetton's advertising found its heirs long ago.

Cover image and in-text images from various brand advertisements.