✨ Katie Martell’s Post

This is a fantastic article by one of my favorite writers, arguing that the campus protests are a direct consequence of university administrations promoting, honoring and valorizing earlier generations of activists (often with little plaques, and note these original activists were often armed!), and actively encouraging students to use their voices to push for change. The parallels with corporate leaders are overwhelming. They too spent years aggressively signaling that leading with values and taking stands and “stakeholder capitalism” was what they wanted. They didn’t. They just wanted good PR and new students/customers. Whatever you think of the activists, this hypocrisy is staggering.

Is it the end of employee activism? From the classrooms where I spend time, the answer is simple: I don’t think so! In 2018, “stakeholder capitalism” rhetoric and CEO activism took off, as leaders made a lot of noise about “speaking up for what’s right” on things like climate change and DACA and gun control. In the process, the Overton Window shifted, and a whole new array of challenges were felt to be in the purview of corporations. This was most intense in Silicon Valley, but it soon spread. Now, Google has fired employees for protesting contracts with the Israeli government. Leaders have realized they’ve unleashed something they can’t control. But dialing it back is not so simple: “The moves are a correction to the last several years, when corporate leaders often brooked dissent and encouraged staff to voice their personal convictions. On issues such as immigration policy and racial justice, many chief executives publicly expressed corporate solidarity. Google, in particular, has long prided itself on an open work culture that fostered internal debate, much like a college campus. It is an open question as to what rights workers really have to speak out on the job. “None of this is settled,” said Genevieve Lakier, a law professor at the University of Chicago. Workers in the private sector aren’t protected by the First Amendment’s guarantees of free speech, and “there is still a lot of uncertainty about how much free expression by workers is consistent with the operations of the workplace,” she said. Numerous workers reported being fired from companies after writing contentious social-media posts about the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks in Israel or the war in Gaza. At Google, leaders said the protesting workers violated company policy by taking over office spaces and disrupting work. While preserving the company’s open culture is important, Google CEO Sundar Pichai wrote to staff afterward, “we also need to be more focused in how we work, collaborate, discuss and even disagree.” This is really the issue. Corporations speaking up morphed into employees speaking up. What happens when passionate young employees collide with the CEO’s PR machine? Now, read this The Wall Street Journal summary of what’s going on, and then my recent Big Idea piece in Harvard Business Review talks about what to do about it! https://lnkd.in/dxhV5_3N https://lnkd.in/djA4a4ey Update, given some of the comments on this thread, here’s an article I wrote BACK IN 2018 titled “Why the new CEO activism is a bad idea for everyone” https://lnkd.in/dBHtmPD7 Tried to explain at the time!! 🤷♀️

Happy Wednesday from NYC, where today, I appear with an announcement. I had a journalism professor at Boston University who once told me to "be brilliant at the basics." He was right. He's still right. The basics are what matter. The fancy things are all fine and good, but if you don't get the basics right, or worse, if you replace the basics with things people never asked for, that's where you run into trouble. After I posted last week about the death of HARO at the hands of Cision, I received well over 2,000 replies asking me if I'd consider building a new version. Not connected to the old one, but rather, one that went back to basics. A simple email sent out every day, using my connections, that could help both journalists and sources connect around the world. In other words, could I be brilliant at the basics once again? Originally, I didn't want to. But you'd be amazed what 2,000 emails all asking the same thing can do, so, in classic ADHD fashion, I thought... "Why not?" Introducing Help Every Reporter Out - HERO. It's exactly what it sounds like. You sign up, you get (for now) an email each day with queries from journalists around the world. If you can help the journalist, do it. As it was originally, it will ALWAYS BE FREE. I'm not going to charge for it. I never did. The one thing I do ask of you? Tell friends. Send the link around. Tell your journalist friends. As before, the more people who use it, the better it will be for everyone. One cool new thing - There are tons of things I can do with HERO that I wasn't able to do before - Better tracking, AI integration... Depending on what works and what doesn't, we'll see what happens. But for now, let's go back to the basics. What do you say? Want to join me? Go on. Be a HERO. 😀 https://lnkd.in/eJ3723kJ #journalism #sources #publicrelations #pr #media #publicity #entrepreneurship #dontcallitacomeback

It's been 20 years since launch of our Campaign for Real Beauty and our work is not done yet. From our biggest ever study of beauty around the world, we know that women and girls still feel huge pressure to be a certain type of beautiful. And that one of the biggest threats to the representation of real beauty is #AI, which is predicted to be 90% of the content online by 2025. AI-generated content is perpetuating unrealistic beauty standards and lacks representation; even when women and girls know the images they see are fake or AI-generated, still 1 in 3 feel pressure to alter their appearance.   The work that Dove began 20 years ago is more important than ever. That’s why today, we are renewing our vows to Real Beauty and committing to never using AI to create or distort women's images in our ads. And we are taking action to equip people, creators, and brands using AI to make the most of it when exploring and generating Real Beauty with our #RealBeautyPromptPlaybook: a free tool to create visual content that widens the representation of beauty on the most popular GenAI tools. While Dove and creators cannot change the pre-existing biases of the data AI uses to generate images, we can help to change the generated images outcome through the power of the prompt. Let’s #KeepBeautyReal. Even in AI. 💙 Learn more at Dove.com/KeepBeautyReal #Dove #LetsChangeBeauty *Artificial Intelligence has been used in this advertising/film for the sole purpose of showing beauty bias in generative AI tools.

My advice for marketers and executives supporting the LGBTQ community in our current political environment is there is power in doing the right thing and standing by that. Utilize resources like GLAAD. You don't have to do this alone and you cannot do this alone. Ultimately, doing the right thing improves the value of your company. Thank you Emily Glazer and The Wall Street Journal for an incredible conversation on Marketing Through Culture Wars where we talked about the increasingly polarizing landscape faced by marketers today, why some companies have fallen victim to a vocal minority and advice for companies on marketing through backlash. You can watch our full discussion here ⤵ https://lnkd.in/eSYyjm6R