There are PR crises that are difficult to predict.
A product fails unexpectedly. An executive says something during a live interview. An employee makes a bad decision. A world event suddenly puts your company in the middle of a conversation it never expected to be part of.
And then there are the crises where you look at the finished product and ask one very simple question:
How did nobody stop this?
That is the question Converse is answering right now.
The sneaker brand pulled an advertisement featuring K-pop star Karina after critics said imagery in the photo evoked the Ku Klux Klan and lynching. Converse apologized, and CEO Aaron Cain has told employees the company is reviewing the internal processes that allowed the image to be published in the first place.
And that last part is what interests me.
Because this isn’t really a story about one bad advertisement.
It’s a story about the people, processes and judgment that are supposed to prevent a bad advertisement from ever becoming a PR crisis.
What Happened
Converse published an image featuring Karina wearing a white skirt and holding a pair of black Chuck 70 X sneakers.
ABC Australia: Converse Ad Pulled After Accused of Racism
Critics quickly pointed to the visual composition. A triangular area of light on Karina’s skirt was interpreted by some viewers as resembling a Ku Klux Klan hood. The position of the shoes she was holding was also interpreted as evoking dangling feet associated with a lynching.
Whether that interpretation was intended isn’t really the communications question.
Of course Converse didn’t set out to create an advertisement that people would associate with racist violence.
But intent doesn’t erase impact.
And once people saw it, they couldn’t unsee it.
TikTok: DJ SoulChild AC
Converse removed the image and apologized, saying it understood why people found the image deeply upsetting and acknowledging that the company got this wrong.
CEO Aaron Cain went further in an internal memo reported by Bloomberg, saying the images should not have been used and that leadership was taking a hard look at both the company’s review process and the critical lens applied to its work.
That is actually the right question.
Because someone approved this. Probably several someones.
1. The Probelm Isn't Just the Ad
People sometimes imagine advertising as a creative person sitting at a computer, making something and hitting post.
That isn’t how major global brands operate.
There are creative teams. Brand teams. Marketing leaders. Agencies. Social teams. Legal reviews. Executives. Regional teams. Sometimes there are so many people involved that getting an advertisement approved can feel harder than getting a bill through Congress.
And yet somehow an image can make it through all of that and create an immediate reaction online that seemingly nobody inside the approval process anticipated.
That’s the failure.
Not simply: Who made this?
But: Who was empowered to question it?
There is an enormous difference.
Great communications cultures aren’t built around finding one person to blame when something goes wrong. They’re built around creating enough permission for someone to say, before something goes wrong: Wait. Look at this again.
Bloomberg via Mint: Converse CEO Pledges Review Over Ad Critics Say Evoked KKK
2. Someone Needs to Be the Person Who Ruins the Fun
I’ve spent a lot of my career in rooms where everyone is excited about an idea.
The creative is clever. The campaign is bold. The executives love it. The team has spent weeks working on it.
Then the PR person asks the annoying question: “What happens if people interpret this differently?”
Nobody particularly enjoys that moment. But that is part of our job.
Communicators need to look at a campaign the way the internet will look at it, not simply the way the creative team intended it.
Take away the creative brief. Take away the strategy presentation. Take away the explanation of what the photographer was trying to accomplish. Now put one image on someone’s phone.
What do they see?
Because that is how your audience experiences your work. They don’t get the creative brief. They get the post.
3. Context Doesn't Travel With Content
This is becoming one of the most important realities of modern communications.
Content travels. Context usually doesn’t.
A photograph created as one frame in a larger campaign can be screenshotted. A 30-second video can become a three-second clip. A joke can become a headline. An internal presentation can become a leaked slide. And something designed for one country or audience can be circulating globally within minutes.
AdWeek: Too Many Cooks Spoiled Converse’s Global Ad Rollout
Marketers and creatives see the brief and all the iterations that produced the final work. Consumers often see one isolated image.
That difference matters enormously.
Inside the room, everyone knows what you meant. Outside the room, nobody owes you that context.
4. The Apology Wasn't the Biggest Problem
I actually think Converse’s response did several things correctly.
It apologized. It didn’t argue with people about what they were seeing. It removed the content. And its CEO acknowledged that the internal review process needs examination.
Those are appropriate crisis steps.
Instagram: Converse Apology
But companies sometimes focus so much attention on perfecting the apology that they overlook the more important communications investment: Building a system that makes the apology unnecessary.
You cannot crisis-communicate your way out of every preventable mistake. Eventually you have to prevent some of them.
And that requires communications leaders to have real authority inside organizations.
PR cannot simply be the department that receives a call after the internet catches fire. We need to be in the room before someone lights the match.
5. We've Seen This Movie Before
What makes the Converse situation especially interesting is that it comes amid a string of brands facing backlash over advertising that audiences interpreted very differently from how the companies apparently intended it.
Axios: Converse Apologizes, Pulls Ad That Drew KKK Comparisons
That’s not really a creative problem. It’s a governance problem.
If controversial work repeatedly survives layers of sophisticated organizations before the public identifies an obvious reputational risk within minutes, companies need to rethink what “approval” actually means.
An approval chain isn’t useful simply because 12 people checked a box. It works when at least one of those people is specifically responsible for asking: What could we be missing?
6. The Red-Team Test
Before a major campaign goes live, someone who wasn’t deeply involved in creating it should try to destroy it.
Seriously.
Give them the final image, video, tagline or activation without the pitch deck. Then ask:
- What is the worst reasonable interpretation of this?
- What historical or cultural imagery could people associate with it?
- What happens when this image is separated from the rest of the campaign?
- How will this look as a screenshot?
- What headline could a reporter write about it?
- How would we explain it if our CEO were asked about it tomorrow morning?
- Is there an audience in the room who might see something we’re not seeing?
- If this goes viral for the wrong reason, will we still defend publishing it?
And here’s the important part: Don’t ask those questions when the campaign is 90 percent finished and millions of dollars have already been committed. Ask them while you can still change something.
7. Diversity Matters. So Does Dissent.
There is another lesson here that goes beyond any individual campaign.
Organizations need different perspectives in the room. That includes diversity of race, culture, geography, age and lived experience.
But representation alone isn’t enough. People also need permission to disagree.
You can have the most diverse meeting in corporate America and still make terrible decisions if everyone believes their job is to nod when the boss loves the idea.
The best communications cultures reward the person willing to say: “I know we love this, but I’m seeing something else.”
That person isn’t slowing down creativity. They’re protecting it.
Learnings
- Build challenge into the approval process. Every major campaign needs a designated person or team whose job is not simply to approve the work, but to pressure-test it for reputational risk.
- Review the creative without the context. If an image, headline or clip cannot stand on its own without a deck explaining the intent, assume the audience may interpret it differently.
- Give communications real veto power. PR should not be the cleanup crew. Communications leaders need the authority to stop or escalate creative when they see a material reputational risk.
- Create room for dissent. A healthy culture makes it safe for someone—regardless of title—to say, “I see a problem here,” even after senior leaders have fallen in love with the idea.
- Stress-test for screenshots and fragments. Ask how every asset will look when it is cropped, reposted, clipped, memed or separated from the rest of the campaign.
- Bring different lived experiences into the review. A broader set of perspectives can surface cultural, historical and visual associations that an approval team may miss.
- Fix the system after the apology. The measure of a crisis response isn’t only the statement. It is whether the organization changes the process that created the crisis in the first place.
The Takeaway
Converse’s CEO says the company is examining the process that allowed this advertisement to be published.
Every communications leader should do the same thing before their company becomes the next case study.
Pull out your approval process. Look at who reviews major creative. Then ask yourself:
Is everyone reviewing this to approve it, or is someone reviewing it to challenge it?
Those are very different jobs.
The best communications teams aren’t simply good at responding to crises. They’re good at spotting the thing that could become a crisis while there’s still time to change it.
Because by the time thousands of people on social media are pointing out what your internal review process missed, the communications problem isn’t just the advertisement anymore.
It’s your judgment.
And that’s much harder to pull down from Instagram.
Until next time,
Aaron Blank
President and CEO
Fearey