What We Can Learn from Apple and Bumble

Advertising backlash is nothing new. The internet feeds on backlash, and advertising is no exception. 

But last week’s examples, from Bumble and Apple, feel particularly acute. These two campaigns offend the very people they’re ostensibly speaking to. So what happened here? And how can we change the way we work on brands to ensure we don’t find ourselves frantically writing a press worthy apology? 

Bumble’s apology says that they were making “an attempt to lean into a community frustrated by modern dating.” “Lean into.” I think that language is telling. It sounds more like hopping on a trend than an attempt at understanding it. I wonder whether they spoke to the people in this community - and if they did, whether they talked to them about the work. 

The Apple case is interesting because we can assume the work was made by people who are actually part of the creative class themselves. It is a visually arresting piece of work; I bet it was fun to make. And yet a quick gut check with members of the creative class would almost certainly have helped them see past their blind spots. 

Let’s side aside, for a moment, the fact that both of these campaigns were made in-house. As an industry, we’re too often guilty of working this way. It is far too easy in the year 2024 to dig around on the internet and find a niche community, to point to that community as interesting and novel and even creatively inspirational. This has often been a gift: we get to witness conversations that required so much more work to observe just ten years ago. 

But it is also a glaring weakness and increasingly a crutch. We observe these communities from a distance, without ever even speaking to them. In the case of a brand like Bumble, that makes it too easy to use a community’s uniqueness without actually acknowledging their genuine fears and anxieties. Even that word, community, lets us treat people like people who only exist on the internet, rather than in real life. We’re glorified lurkers. 

We have to be better than that. The rest of the world can treat each other like they only exist on the internet. We have to remind ourselves and our partners that there are real, living, breathing people on the other side of those screens. 

If we want to make work that gets people talking, we have to start talking to people. 

Here are some things to consider: 

• High quality qualitative and ethnographic research is on life support. We’re all guilty of letting an afternoon on the internet replace it. By all means, use your now finely honed internet sleuthing skills to find something interesting. But follow through on it. Talk to the people on the other side. If you can’t observe them in person, get them on a Zoom call or FaceTime at minimum. Get them in a WhatsApp group. Whatever you do, don’t assume you understand them because you read their Reddit threads.
• When timelines and budgets are compressed, this kind of thinking is often the first thing to go. If there isn’t time or budget, start by fighting for it. If there still isn’t (there’s never as much as you want), get creative. If you can’t afford a recruiting firm, use all the wonderful tools of the internet to find some real people yourself. Is it a representative sample? No. Is it valuable as a quick gut check? Yes. It may even help you make the case for more thorough investigation. 
• Re-evaluate the execution right up until the moment it ships. There’s a tipping point in every project, usually right around the time production kicks in, when we switch from evaluating the work to executing it. And while it’s not healthy or possible to rethink every decision at every step, it is important to get out of our bubbles just long enough to see the work the way others will. That means involving whoever is responsible for research, or for knowing your audience, during the production process. Gut-check with the public (again) if something isn’t sitting right. 

None of these brands ever set out to piss off their audiences. The point is not to gleefully rake them over the coals - there but for the grace of God, as they say. But there are gentle warning signs in these moments, and an opportunity for us all. 

Finally, while poorly executed, these brands should get some credit for trying to communicate a real point of view. It’s so easy to make forgettable advertising - arguably the majority of advertising out there falls into that category. And there are some who would argue that even the backlash means people are talking about these brands. 

But we can’t settle for “any backlash is good backlash.” If our objective is to make provocative work that’s effective, we have to pay more attention to the people we’re talking to.