Why is Silicon Valley suddenly supporting Black Lives Matter?
Times change. And big brands change with them.
(estimated reading time: 6.5 minutes. originally appeared here)
In the last few weeks, it seems that the US was on fire. We live in quite interesting times (i think that’s a Chinese curse) with the whole world in the middle of a pandemic (luckily, it seems that we are past the first wave), a presidential election coming on the US, and now this.
After the death of George Floyd on May 25, numerous protests broke out in several US cities, starting from Minneapolis and in the next few weeks 23 people were killed during the protests and more than 1000 people were arrested. In an amazingly interconnected world (thanks to social media) protests also broke out in several cities worldwide as well, some of them quite big, some of them smaller but cringewarming*, nonetheless.
These protests, while not sure if they started out or have later become part of a much larger initiative, the Black Lives Matter (BLM), “an organized movement favoring non-violent civil disobedience in protest against alleged incidents of police brutality against Afro-American people” have undoubtedly shaken up things.
Enter tech
Black Lives Matter is not a new thing. Since the activistic movement broke out, in 2013, a lot of tension was generated between its supporters and Silicon Valley companies mostly for the lack of support of the latter.
But this has changed after the Floyd murder: big tech has become one of the most vocal and fierce supporters of the BLM movement, on a scale rarely seen before for any similar social cause.
Mark Zuckerberg pledged $10M to be donated from Facebook to racial justice organizations. YouTube announced a $100M fund for black creators. Apple and Google also announced commitments in the range of hundreds of millions of dollars funneled towards racial equity initiatives and support of black business owners, founders. Some of the actions taken were more symbolic: If a user asks Alexa if black lives matter, the voice assistant will answer that “Black lives matter. I believe in racial equality. I stand in solidarity with the black community in the fight against systemic racism and injustice.” Reddit changed its logo from red to black. On Spotify, the app suggested a “Black Lives Matter” playlist. Most, if not all, of big tech’s executives, have expressed at least one sign of solidarity with the BLM movement.
Reading between the lines.
Critics claim -and I think they are right- that big tech has been mostly silent in the past few years, regarding social justice causes. The BLM movement started in 2013 and numerous police brutality incidents happened in the last few years. The Verge seems to pose similar questions, in this article titled “Big Tech Companies are responding to George Floyd in a way they never did for Michael Brown”. In a comparison of then (Michael Brown was a police violence victim back in 2014) and now, the discrepancy is evident.
So why now?
It could be that in traversing the final year of Trump’s first term, big tech has finally decided to speak up and that’s an ok explanation. There’s also some heat, regarding SV’s previous shortcoming and lack of black tech workers. It could be that big tech has decided to do what they think is right. Or that SV tech employees are mostly sympathetic about social justice causes.
But is there more?
When talking about decisions made by multi-billion making entities of huge impact, one has to reflect: what’s in it for them? What does big tech stand to gain by supporting BLM? I think there’s an answer to that.
Let’s go back to Nike’s Colin Kaepernick ad. In 2018, Nike created a -truly remarkable- campaign, that also went to win an Emmy, featuring a huge athlete that protested police brutality in the USA by taking a knee during the National Anthem. The backlash against Nike was huge, with people posting videos on Twitter burning their Nike shoes under the hashtag #JustBurnIt while many influential (in social media terms) accounts e.g. this account, drew out their swords against the sports brand
It might seem as the rational and humane thing for a big company to do, defend an athlete that takes a knee for social justice, but it helps to remember that Nike is selling 780 million shoes a year and not all of them are sold to clients that are sympathetic to the cause. Big brands in the past trod lightly and tried to stay out of politics as these things can become risky. So, all in all, it was a really bold and innovative move that could blowback, or pay off.
And it paid off.
Online sales grew by 31% in the bank holiday weekend after the ad launched, according to researcher Edison Trends.
Also, this
And then, there’s Gillette. The shaving company has been seeing a decline in sales for years due to the changing habits of consumers (clean shaving is going of fashion while beard grooming is the new thing). And then, they made this ad and became relevant once more.
They too seem to have gained a boost of PR although they did not manage to stop declining sales.
In the attention-deficit disordered world of us, consumers, it seems simplistic to pronounce that it pays off to create controversy, what some critics call “Outrage Marketing” while supporters call “Taking a stance”. The thing though with big-tech is that they are playing a long game, so while short-term gain is one explanation, I think that’s not the whole story.
As Henry Boyd, a Marketing professor from the University of Maryland pointed out for brands
The luxury of standing in the middle of the road and saying, ‘Well, I’m not going to take a position’ — I think those days are gone
I think I have to agree with that and think that these two powerful and carefully created campaigns coming from Gilette and Nike, two huge brands, have something to do with how Silicon Valley is responding to the BLM movement today.
PS: There is also this Pepsi ad with Kendal Jenner, a half-assed, unoriginal effort for Pepsi to be involved in social issues that -surprise, surprise- did not go well.
On a final note, either one supports big tech on their BLM involvement or not, we should not forget that the video showing the murder of George Floyd and many-many other police brutality incidents were shot on a smartphone, the grassroots organization of the protests was done mostly through social media and the coverage and the rapid, never-seen-before worldwide expansion of the protests was made possible through social media too.
Tweet of the week
At first, I wanted to use this xhamster (porn site) data tweet showing the increase in searches for Elon Musk, after the internet read this news and went on to search for a porn video of Musk (the internet moves in mysterious ways). But that tweet from Shann Puri, part of a larger thread, is so much cooler. Puri, an ex-restaurant owner compares running a brick and mortar business to running a software company and I know that most of the people reading this don’t need convincing but still it is quite fascinating regarding the insights in running a non-software business. Peter Thiel also makes a similar comparison on his Zero to One book.
That’s it, thanks for reading and am waiting for your comments. See you in two weeks from now.
PS: If you have friends that are into tech and startups you can share
Share Tech & Stuff
* Cringewarming: A neologism by my friend Stratos that combined the words “heartwarming” and “cringe”
