Pernod Ricard wants to halt the spread of hate
Perhaps it should stop donating to politicians who think elsewise?
Pernod Ricard, the $9 billion French alcoholic beverage company, wants to “help stop the spread of hate” online.
Following this summer’s #StopHateForProfit campaign, which saw about 1,000 advertisers (including Pernod Ricard) pause or pull spend across Facebook, Pernod Ricard is creating its own thing called #EngageResponsibly, which according to a press statement “is endorsed by the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) and Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), supported by WPP and powered by Salesforce technology.”
The parent to Absolut vodka is creating an ant-hate certification program to help brands understand their ‘hate footprint’ and provide them with a way to invest in nonprofits that are “fighting hate or support communities most impacted by hate to offset it.”
Introduced at the ANA annual event yesterday Pernod Ricard USA CEO Anne Mukherjee said
“As advertisers, we simply can’t ask people to engage with our brands and social platforms, and then absolve ourselves of accountability. We cannot selectively choose to see and take advantage of the best aspects of these spaces, and then turn a blind eye to the negative as if it’s only the platform’s responsibility, or that of the industry associations to address a problem that impacts us all.”
Pernod, with help from Salesforce, is also developing a tool that people can use to flag questionable content outside of the means provided by the social media companies. It’s a pretty simple set-up: Users can send direct messages to @EngageResponsibly and the group promises to then forward the complaints to the social media companies.
“We are not arbiters of what’s right and wrong. We are sharing it with the platforms, making them aware that this is being surfaced as an issue,” Pernod Ricard North American Chief Marketing Officer Pam Forbus said in an interview. “Some consumers—we’ve done our research on this—say they want an easier way to report.”
On the surface, this is a nice idea. Who doesn’t want to stop the spread of hate online?
However, there are some lingering questions. Reports across media all indicate that “the tools and technologies that will make up the crux of Engage Responsibly’s efforts are still in development,” per Adweek.
Companies that make announcements before the tools are in place can often smell more like a PR stunt.
And it got the press that the company sought.
(Side note: check out the ledes to both Digiday and Adweek; remarkably similar.)
Perhaps this is overly cynical; I get it.
But it’s hard to square an announcement about a tool to help stop the spread of hate that doesn’t quite exist yet AND the fact that Pernod Ricard has given tens of thousands of dollars to politicians and PACs that have put policies in place that, as the Washington Post writes:
It seems probable that [Mitch] McConnell’s epitaph will note instead that no one since the Southern segregationists of the 1940s and 1950s did more to cripple the proper functioning of all three branches of government, not to mention faith in the very idea of one America.
Over the last 10 years, the company has given $55,000 to Republicans and $16,000 to Democrats.
For this election, the company has also given $1,000 to Tom Cotton (R-AR). Here’s who else they’ve given to this cycle.
(Image via FollowTheMoney)
The alcoholic beverage company also continues to run ads on Facebook. According to the Facebook Ad Library, it’s currently running 6 campaigns on Facebook and Instagram.
It’s laudable when companies want to address societal issues. As employers and community builders (as well as their goal of making money), they should want to make sure they are doing the right thing.
And the recent movement of “cause marketing” is a prime example of how companies are understanding that you can’t just slap your brand’s logo on a “cause” without having the goods behind it; you have to actually do the thing you say you’re doing. Patagonia is seen as credible when it talks about environmental conservation, for example, because it has spent years building policies that align with its message.
But it can often ring hollow when data shows the disconnect between what they say versus where they put their money.
Stopping the spread of hate on platforms is a good idea! But when you also give money to politicians that push corrosive and hateful policies, you can’t get up on your high horse.
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Jerry Garcia and Merl Saunders, “Positively 4th Street”
Some interesting links:
For how to lose more than a billion dollars
Quibi Is Shutting Down as Problems Mount (WSJ)
For media criticism:
Inside the Right-Wing Media Echo Chamber’s Smear of NBC’s Kristen Welker (Daily Beast)
OAN Built a Safe Space for People Who Think Fox News Is Too Liberal (Bloomberg)
Facebook Manipulated the News You See to Appease Republicans, Insiders Say (Mother Jones)
Trump is doing worse than it seems — but reporters are afraid to say so (Politico)
For magazine covers:
Time replaces its logo for the first time in its history. Now, it says 'Vote' (CNN)
For TV and sports:
TV Ratings for Many Sports Are Down. Don’t Read Too Much Into It Yet. (NYT)