Sunday brunch, a table of marketing people, and somebody pulls up their phone: “Have you seen the Converse thing?”
By now you probably have. Converse’s “Stars Align with Karina” campaign for the Chuck 70 X, featuring K-pop star Karina, included a promotional video that put her in a spotlight shaped like the brand’s signature star. A frame pulled from that video, showing her long white skirt catching a shadow that a lot of viewers read as a Klan hood, with the dangling shoes beside her, is what set off the backlash. Days later, a separate still image for the brand’s Palmes collaboration showed a man on a ladder holding sneakers over a tree branch, and people connected it to Strange Fruit. Converse pulled both and apologized: “We understand why this image is deeply upsetting and recognize that we got this wrong.”
Here’s how fast it moved once people started comparing the two:
We’re not going to spend this post reverse-engineering what the videographer or creative director meant, who signed off on the edit, or whether the contrast got punched up for social. That analysis is happening everywhere else online, and honestly, it’s beside the point we want to make. What we want to talk about is the muscle that would have caught this before it ever shipped, because that muscle is something every brand can build… and most don’t.
Intent doesn’t decide what an image says
Nobody hands out an artist’s statement with a sneaker ad. There’s no wall text explaining what the photographer was going for, the way there might be next to a painting in a gallery. What’s left is just the image, landing on millions of individual screens, each one read through whatever that viewer already carries.
Someone online described the Karina ad as a Rorschach test: what you see in it says as much about you as it does about the picture. That’s true of nearly all advertising, which is exactly why it’s such a high-stakes place to be careless. A brand doesn’t get to explain its way out of a reaction after the fact. The only real control it has is before the image goes out, in the room where someone decides whether to hit publish.
This wasn’t advertising’s first swing and a miss
Converse is a recent example, but the pattern is old. In 2019, Peloton’s “The Gift That Gives” holiday ad showed a husband gifting his already-fit wife a Peloton bike, then cut to her filming a year-long diary of her rides, thanking him for the “gift.” Viewers read it as unsettling rather than sweet, more about control than fitness, and the backlash was loud enough to move the company’s stock. A few years earlier, Protein World’s “Are You Beach Body Ready?” campaign, a bikini model next to that headline, papered London’s Underground and triggered protests, petitions, and a formal ad-standards complaint. Neither of those had anything to do with race. Both were still the same basic failure: a team inside a building looked at an image, felt fine about it, and never seriously tested how it would land with people who weren’t in that room.
It’s easy to market to yourself
We worked with a company once where the in-house social team was young, sharp, and genuinely excited about the brand. They hopped on every trend the moment it hit, from dance challenges to whatever meme format was having its week. It was fun. It felt current. It also had almost nothing to do with the people actually buying the product, a customer base that skewed 55+ and barely touched the platform where all that energy was going. The analytics backed it up: internal enthusiasm, flat results. That’s the trap with an echo chamber. It feels great for the people inside it, but it doesn’t ask what the message is doing for the people the brand actually needs to reach.
That gap tends to be structural, not just a one-off oversight. Advertising’s leadership is still notably narrow: as of 2022, over 80% of the industry’s C-suite and senior executives were white, even as the campaigns themselves have grown more diverse in who they cast and feature. When the group making the final call is narrower than the audience the ad is meant to reach, blind spots aren’t a surprise. They’re close to guaranteed.
Every creative process needs a Captain Buzzkill
New marketers hear “you don’t know what you don’t know” early and often, and it’s a little bit of a cliché by now, but it holds up. Some of the best young talent we’ve worked with went on to build genuinely great careers, and part of what got them there was learning to recognize the edge of their own perspective and call in help when they hit it. That’s not a weakness. It’s the more senior move.
Every strong creative process needs someone whose job (at least some of the time) is to be the reflective, deciding voice: the one who looks at a nearly-finished campaign and asks what it might look like to someone who isn’t in the room, who’s seeing it cold on a feed between a friend’s vacation photos and a news alert. Half-affectionately known as Captain Buzzkill, this role is genuinely crucial, and it’s usually best played by someone with enough design and cultural fluency to explain why a choice is risky, not just that it feels off. There’s a real difference between “crop this tighter” said with authority and no real grounding, and “here’s specifically why this composition reads the way it does, and here’s what would fix it.” The second one is a skill. It can be learned, hired for, or brought in from outside when a team doesn’t have it in-house yet.
Literacy is a skill, not a personality trait
None of this requires assuming the worst about anyone’s intentions, on this campaign or any other. It requires accepting that intent and impact are two different things, and that closing the gap between them takes actual visual and cultural literacy, not just good taste or good instincts. Good instincts get you most of the way. They don’t replace someone trained to ask “what else could this look like” before the internet asks it for you.
The brands that handle this well aren’t the ones that never make a risky choice. They’re the ones with a real checkpoint before launch, staffed by someone secure enough to say “I’m not sure about this” out loud. That’s not slowing the process down for its own sake. It’s the cheapest insurance a campaign will ever buy.
