FARMINGDALE, NY – JUNE 19: Phil Mickelson’s caddie Jim ‘Bones’ MacKay carries their Callaway bag during the second round of the 109th U.S. Open on the Black Course at Bethpage State Park on June 19, 2009 in Farmingdale, New York.(Photo by Rob Tringali/SportsChrome/Getty Images)
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The approval process for marketing campaigns is getting more scrutiny. Most recently, Callaway and Good Good Golf are under fire over an ad they approved and published that depicted a man pushing a woman to the ground, standing over her, and threatening her.
Consumer backlash was swift, and the ad was pulled. Retailers, including Dick’s Sporting Goods and Golf Galaxy, removed Good Good products from stores and online. Both Callaway and Good Good Golf issued apologies, with Callaway acknowledging specifically that the approval for the ad “should never have happened.”
Callaway has since ended its partnership with Good Good and acknowledged that its content review process wasn’t comprehensive enough, and it has since strengthened its approval procedures.
The controversy comes the same week that retailer Target also issued an apology for a culturally insensitive Halloween costume it sold. After negative consumer reaction, the brand pulled the product, issued an apology with a promise to investigate how to prevent something like that from happening again.
Different brands, different incidents, same question:
How are culturally offensive products and campaigns getting approved?
The answer is often simple. An approval process is only as good as the criteria being used – and the ability of the reviewers to apply them.
If cultural appropriateness isn’t part of those criteria, adding another approver, or another approval step, may not solve the problem.
And even if it is included, the process can still fail if the person reviewing the work doesn’t have the cultural intelligence needed to recognize an issue.
What Are Your Approvers Actually Reviewing?
When a marketing manager or whoever is responsible for approvals looks at a campaign, they typically evaluate it through the lens they’ve been tasked to assess.
Does it meet the brief? Is the branding correct? Are the product claims accurate? Does it comply with legal requirements? Does the copy work? Is the product depicted correctly?
But if that lens doesn’t include cultural intelligence, cultural appropriateness or a prompt to consider how different types of consumers could receive the campaign, those factors may never be evaluated.
Layer on the sheer volume of content brands now produce across channels – from creators, agencies, partners and internal teams – and individual pieces may receive even less time and attention.
That doesn’t even address whether the person approving the content has the knowledge needed to recognize a potential cultural issue in the first place.
Brands that want to reduce the likelihood of publishing content consumers will revolt against should turn their attention to their marketing infrastructure.
That starts with defining what reviewers are actually responsible for evaluating.
Turn Brand Values Into Specific Approval Criteria
Callaway’s own response illustrates an important problem. The company said the content did not reflect its values, including its opposition to domestic violence, discrimination and threatening behavior.
But the content was still approved.
Having values and operationalizing those values are two different things.
A company can say it values inclusion, respect or belonging. But unless those values are translated into criteria people can actually use when reviewing creative, they may not influence an approval decision at all.
The goal isn’t to turn every person who reviews marketing materials into a complete repository of everything that could potentially offend someone.
Instead, brands need to establish clear guardrails.
For instance, brand guidelines or another internal resource might specify:
We don’t use ableist language. We don’t create content that promotes or appears to promote violence. We don’t reinforce stereotypical power dynamics that could cause harm.
Those instructions give someone reviewing marketing materials specific criteria for evaluating what is and isn’t acceptable.
General guardrails are important, but brands should also consider the specific customers they serve.
If women are an important customer group for a brand, for instance, its guidelines should provide guidance about appropriate and inappropriate ways to talk about or depict women.
The same principle applies to other communities within a brand’s customer base.
What representations should teams avoid? What stereotypes could cause harm? What language is inappropriate? What historical or cultural context should someone creating or reviewing content understand?
No guideline will anticipate every possible scenario. That isn’t the goal.
The goal is to reduce the amount of cultural risk a company leaves entirely to individual judgment.
Equip Reviewers To Apply The Criteria
Clear approval criteria are an important start. But putting cultural guardrails into a document doesn’t mean everyone responsible for approvals will know how to apply them.
For every consumer who looked at the Callaway and Good Good ad and was outraged, there were others who looked at it and wondered what the big deal was.
The same thing can happen inside a company.
A guideline might tell reviewers not to reinforce harmful stereotypical power dynamics. But does the person reviewing the campaign know what that looks like?
Would they recognize it in a joke? In casting? In the relationship between two characters? In who has authority, who is portrayed as competent or who becomes the punchline?
If not, the guideline alone won’t provide much protection.
That’s why brands need to pair cultural guardrails with the knowledge and training required to apply them.
Reviewers don’t need to become experts on every cultural group or memorize every scenario that could cause offense. But they do need enough cultural intelligence to recognize when something may violate the brand’s standards.
Give Reviewers A Way To Escalate What They Don’t Know
There will inevitably be situations where the people responsible for approving marketing materials don’t have sufficient knowledge to determine if something is appropriate.
That shouldn’t be a failure of the process. It should be a part of the process.
Brands need a defined way for reviewers to escalate questionable content when they don’t have the cultural expertise to make the call.
Depending on the organization, that expertise might come from someone internally, customer research, an advisory group or an external consultant.
What matters is that reviewers know when additional expertise is needed, where to get it and that they have permission to stop the approval process until they do.
The objective isn’t to eliminate individual judgment. It’s to give that judgment better inputs and a safety net when those inputs aren’t sufficient.
Limited and vague guidelines make it easier for questionable content to get approved. Clearly defined guardrails, reviewers equipped with cultural intelligence and a process for escalating uncertainty significantly reduce risk.
Ideally, that knowledge shouldn’t be limited to reviewers. It should be shared with the marketers, creators, agencies and partners developing the work. Building cultural intelligence in from the start reduces costly rework and helps brands make better use of their resources and timelines.