I told you the other day that Nike is in trouble and that I know this from them running an ad, right? Well, I found it again. In fact, I don't seem to be able to avoid it. So let's discuss...
As I pointed out, when companies make stupid decisions, they publicly deny that their decision was stupid or that it cost them anything. This is part of a herd policing strategy -- if you tell everyone that everything is ok, most people will accept that as true. Then their supporters (paid or otherwise) will back this up by spinning whatever news they can.
So how do you know they're in trouble? They start running ads you've never seen before that try to whitewash what they've done. You see this all the time in DC, whenever Lockheed or Boeing gets busted for some accounting issues or whatever, their ads mysteriously appear overnight on television in the DC area touting how trustworthy and indispensable they are. There's never an announcement that they started this advertising, nor do the ads directly mention the controversy nor have you usually seen ads from them before, but they suddenly appear all over the place in an attempt to bolster the company image, and they usually say the direct opposite of the trouble they are in.
When they get in deep trouble, like Wells Fargo, the ads can even get rather pointed and might make a heavily-spun reference to the scandal. Recent Wells Fargo ads, for example, talk about how they are a company built on trust starting in the 1880s and continuing until today until something nebulous somehow kinda sorta happened to the company... but it will never happen again... we're winning back your trust from that thing that may or may not have happened! Usually though, these ads aren't that clearly connected to the scandal, they just say the opposite of whatever has happened.
You see this with actors too. A great example is when actors are exposed as utter morons. You will suddenly see all kinds of publicity stories which tout how smart the actor supposedly is. Alicia Silverstone and Hilary Swank are examples of this. Ann Hathaway is forced to deny that she's a total b*tch. Etc.
Anyways, the Colin Kaepernick thing is the perfect example of this. Nike hired Kaepernick for a particular reason, which I'll discuss in a moment. The media, which supports Kaepernick's ideology, tells us that everybody loves him and produces oddly skewed, limited polls that suggest that the public either supports him or isn't bothered by him. They interview only people who support him and describe those who are offended by him in racist terms. They ignored Nike's initial stock price fall of 3% the day the Kaepernick ad campaign was announced, but now are touting that Nike is "at an all time high" as if the two are related (Nike was at an all time high the day it made the announcement, so really the needle hasn't moved). They even did stories on how brilliant the campaign is because Kaepernick brought them millions in free publicity.
So all is good right? Well, no.
See, Kaepernick makes people angry. Kaeprnick is a failed quarterback who got benched after going 3-16 in his last two years. When he got benched, he suddenly started kneeling through the national anthem in protest of whatever. He later claimed it was American racism, police violence and a dozen other things. He then wore socks that called the police pigs, praised Castro in Cuba and became a supporter of angry, radical black racism. This angered vast swaths of white America. The MSM, however, loves him and has done their best to promote him. And what's resulted is that Kaepernick has become a symbol of black anger, like Black Lives Matters -- whom he supports, with blacks supporting him at about 70% and whites opposing him at about 70%.
Enter Nike. Nike signed him to a ridiculous new campaign in which this multimillionaire celebrity claims that he gave up everything to fight for what he believes. He must be a fan of Florida bankruptcy laws, because nowhere else does keeping millions of dollars and staying in all the right social clubs constitute giving up everything. But hey, more power to this fraud.
Why hire him? Nike made this decision because they tap into the black thug market for customers. Just check out their ads and you can see this. Their ads are aimed at ghetto blacks complete with bad sportsmanship, hyper-machoism, the flashing of gang signs, and suggestions of race hate. So signing Kaepernick was a no-brainer. He fits their target market perfectly! Here's the Kaepernick ad:
Unfortunately for Nike, the other part of Nike's market is Starbucks moms who like to wear the gear because it's comfortable and it makes them look like they've been working out. Nike, I suspect, assumed that Starbucks moms wouldn't be offended by their hiring Kaepernick because they probably wouldn't know about it. And even if they did, Starbucks moms like to think of themselves as good liberals who support those cute little black people who need our help so much. Noble savages + white woman's burden.
Something has gone wrong, however, apparently. How do I know? The advertising. Nike didn't advertise on pinterest before this. Now they suddenly are. I'm betting that Kaepernick scared these women. They love supporting neutered black people, but don't like threatening ones and Kaepernick is threatening. He does not give off the warm fuzzies, he gives off the angry gonna-get-yous, and I'll bet they stopped buying Nike yoga pants and leggings. So lo and behold, Nike has suddenly released an ad on pinterest, where Starbucks moms spend their days, and that ad involves a gosh darn cute little black boy. See below:
Isn't he so cute? Look at those fat cheeks and that hair and the oversized clothes! He's so cuddly... he's like a teddy bear... he's so... so harmless. And aw, he's all by himself. He's so adoptable.
What this ad is designed to do is to dissipate Colin Kaepernick fear by reminding these liberalish white women of the types of blacks they like and have been adopting for years. It is designed to convert Kaepernick into a harmless teddy bear and to remind these women that they see blacks as noble savages. Best of all, since the thug community don't go on pinterest, the thug market will never know about it. This way, Nike can sell them black power revolution at the same time it's selling white women tame black people. Interestingly, it seems the only thing Nike doesn't sell in this debate is independent, competent blacks.
I will be curious to see what Nike's next move is.
Thoughts?
As I pointed out, when companies make stupid decisions, they publicly deny that their decision was stupid or that it cost them anything. This is part of a herd policing strategy -- if you tell everyone that everything is ok, most people will accept that as true. Then their supporters (paid or otherwise) will back this up by spinning whatever news they can.
So how do you know they're in trouble? They start running ads you've never seen before that try to whitewash what they've done. You see this all the time in DC, whenever Lockheed or Boeing gets busted for some accounting issues or whatever, their ads mysteriously appear overnight on television in the DC area touting how trustworthy and indispensable they are. There's never an announcement that they started this advertising, nor do the ads directly mention the controversy nor have you usually seen ads from them before, but they suddenly appear all over the place in an attempt to bolster the company image, and they usually say the direct opposite of the trouble they are in.
When they get in deep trouble, like Wells Fargo, the ads can even get rather pointed and might make a heavily-spun reference to the scandal. Recent Wells Fargo ads, for example, talk about how they are a company built on trust starting in the 1880s and continuing until today until something nebulous somehow kinda sorta happened to the company... but it will never happen again... we're winning back your trust from that thing that may or may not have happened! Usually though, these ads aren't that clearly connected to the scandal, they just say the opposite of whatever has happened.
You see this with actors too. A great example is when actors are exposed as utter morons. You will suddenly see all kinds of publicity stories which tout how smart the actor supposedly is. Alicia Silverstone and Hilary Swank are examples of this. Ann Hathaway is forced to deny that she's a total b*tch. Etc.
Anyways, the Colin Kaepernick thing is the perfect example of this. Nike hired Kaepernick for a particular reason, which I'll discuss in a moment. The media, which supports Kaepernick's ideology, tells us that everybody loves him and produces oddly skewed, limited polls that suggest that the public either supports him or isn't bothered by him. They interview only people who support him and describe those who are offended by him in racist terms. They ignored Nike's initial stock price fall of 3% the day the Kaepernick ad campaign was announced, but now are touting that Nike is "at an all time high" as if the two are related (Nike was at an all time high the day it made the announcement, so really the needle hasn't moved). They even did stories on how brilliant the campaign is because Kaepernick brought them millions in free publicity.
So all is good right? Well, no.
See, Kaepernick makes people angry. Kaeprnick is a failed quarterback who got benched after going 3-16 in his last two years. When he got benched, he suddenly started kneeling through the national anthem in protest of whatever. He later claimed it was American racism, police violence and a dozen other things. He then wore socks that called the police pigs, praised Castro in Cuba and became a supporter of angry, radical black racism. This angered vast swaths of white America. The MSM, however, loves him and has done their best to promote him. And what's resulted is that Kaepernick has become a symbol of black anger, like Black Lives Matters -- whom he supports, with blacks supporting him at about 70% and whites opposing him at about 70%.
Enter Nike. Nike signed him to a ridiculous new campaign in which this multimillionaire celebrity claims that he gave up everything to fight for what he believes. He must be a fan of Florida bankruptcy laws, because nowhere else does keeping millions of dollars and staying in all the right social clubs constitute giving up everything. But hey, more power to this fraud.
Why hire him? Nike made this decision because they tap into the black thug market for customers. Just check out their ads and you can see this. Their ads are aimed at ghetto blacks complete with bad sportsmanship, hyper-machoism, the flashing of gang signs, and suggestions of race hate. So signing Kaepernick was a no-brainer. He fits their target market perfectly! Here's the Kaepernick ad:
Unfortunately for Nike, the other part of Nike's market is Starbucks moms who like to wear the gear because it's comfortable and it makes them look like they've been working out. Nike, I suspect, assumed that Starbucks moms wouldn't be offended by their hiring Kaepernick because they probably wouldn't know about it. And even if they did, Starbucks moms like to think of themselves as good liberals who support those cute little black people who need our help so much. Noble savages + white woman's burden.
Something has gone wrong, however, apparently. How do I know? The advertising. Nike didn't advertise on pinterest before this. Now they suddenly are. I'm betting that Kaepernick scared these women. They love supporting neutered black people, but don't like threatening ones and Kaepernick is threatening. He does not give off the warm fuzzies, he gives off the angry gonna-get-yous, and I'll bet they stopped buying Nike yoga pants and leggings. So lo and behold, Nike has suddenly released an ad on pinterest, where Starbucks moms spend their days, and that ad involves a gosh darn cute little black boy. See below:
Isn't he so cute? Look at those fat cheeks and that hair and the oversized clothes! He's so cuddly... he's like a teddy bear... he's so... so harmless. And aw, he's all by himself. He's so adoptable.
What this ad is designed to do is to dissipate Colin Kaepernick fear by reminding these liberalish white women of the types of blacks they like and have been adopting for years. It is designed to convert Kaepernick into a harmless teddy bear and to remind these women that they see blacks as noble savages. Best of all, since the thug community don't go on pinterest, the thug market will never know about it. This way, Nike can sell them black power revolution at the same time it's selling white women tame black people. Interestingly, it seems the only thing Nike doesn't sell in this debate is independent, competent blacks.
I will be curious to see what Nike's next move is.
Thoughts?
8 comments:
P.S. If you see more evidence either way, let me know. I'll be curious how this plays out. Just remember, Nike doesn't care about the public, they care about their markets.
I got nothing to add re: Nike, but I always wondered why I would randomly see commercials in prime time for freight rail.
It depends on what they are after. Where you are at, you have Warren Buffet, who owns a lot of rails. So that could be it.
But more likely than not, they are (1) trying to un-piss-off farmers who don't like their rates, (2) lobbying against the trucking industry (they are responsible for most anti-trucking ads), or (3) they've just done something like have an accident and need to build up support.
As an aside, this kid is practically the only black face you will find on pinterest unless you specifically look for black people.
Let me add, the railroads actually ran a huge campaign against letting truckers haul three trailers in the early 2000s. They painted it as a safety issue and had women drivers scared to death as they truckers blasted by our of control. But the reality was that this was about hamstringing the competition.
I thought Nike hiring Colin K was a strange, bad idea which was going to hurt them, but it does seem to be working out for them.
My explanation for why it worked is something I have crafted in retrospect but I suspect timing matters a lot. That confused off duty cop in Texas and shenanigans around the case are getting a lot of coverage so it was the right time to debut an ad starring an anti-law enforcement millionaire nutjob claiming victim status (lot of that going around :) ).
https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/completely-biased-dallas-area-defense-attorneys-slam-amber-guyger-arrest-document/
And that’s extraordinary. Probable cause affidavits typically paint criminal defendants in the worst light. Per force, they’re kind of supposed to do exactly that. Le Brocq explained:
Probable cause affidavits are the instruments necessary to arrest someone for a crime. Typically, they are conclusory statements (many times unsupported) written against the accused, to secure a warrant for arrest. The affidavit in this case is written such that, one would question why a warrant was even issued. The author of the affidavit writes a story indicating it was a complete mistake and even concludes what the officer subjectively thought, albeit it is stated as “facts” of the case.
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Also, based on my research Nike has been active on Pinterest for years, at least 2013.
https://econsultancy.com/how-nike-uses-facebook-twitter-pinterest-and-google/
Nike has clearly researched the demographic profile of the average Pinterest user, as the only account it has established is for Nike Women.
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*Shrugs* Nike is kind of like Kanye West in that it is phenomenally popular and has a rep for sometimes bizarre antics. Like Kanye West the latest thing is getting more blowback than most things but is broadly in keeping with past performance so I doubt it will mean anything in the medium or long term.
I do not like Phil Knifght or Nike. I don't purchase their products. I think Colin Kapernick is an idiot. I believe in these things. It cost me nothing, however. I just did it
Beautiful Jed.
Anthony, "Active on" is not the same as advertising. Pretty much every company has a pinterest presence of some sort. Advertising is a completely different matter.
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