This weekend, Dove soap was forced to pull a Facebook ad which appeared to show a black woman miraculously turning into a white woman as a result, presumably, of the purifying power of their soap.

The full narrative here is, of course, complicated. As Lola Ogunyemi, the black model featured at the top of the ad explains:

There were seven of us in the full version, different races and ages, each of us answering the same question: “If your skin were a wash label, what would it say?”

So, you can see, perhaps, where Dove was hoping to go with this ad. The intended narrative wasn’t about a black woman cleansing herself into a white woman, but about how, despite our seeming differences, we all have skin and therefore all need to buy soap.

It’s not the worst pitch I’ve ever heard.

The problems here, however, are many. The version of the ad which garnered so much attention featured only three women from the apparently diverse cast and began with Ogunyemi transforming into a white model.

This in itself is enough to raise concern. There is, unfortunately, a long history of racism in soap ads. See, for example Cook’s Lighting Soap and Vinonlia Soap. And such problematic advertising isn’t just in the past: in 2011, Dove had to remove another ad which seemed to imply that black skin was “dirty” while white skin was “clean.”

So you can see, perhaps, why the ad caused so much offense.

As Ogunyemi said, “There is a lack of trust here, and I feel the public was justified in their initial outrage.”

And if the ad wasn’t bad enough, I personally was rather disappointed in Dove’s apology:

As a part of a campaign for Dove body wash, a 3-second video clip was posted to the US Facebook page which featured three women of different ethnicities, each removing a t-shirt to reveal the next woman. The short video was intended to convey that Dove body wash is for every woman and be a celebration of diversity, but we got it wrong. It did not represent the diversity of real beauty which is something Dove is passionate about and is core to our beliefs, and it should not have happened. We have removed the post and have not published any other related content. This should not have happened and we are re-evaluating our internal processes for creating and approving content to prevent us making this type of mistake in the future. We apologize deeply and sincerely for the offense that it has caused and do not condone any activity or imagery that insults any audience.

Giving the impression – accidental or not – that you think black skin is dirty goes far beyond “missing the mark.”

As a reformed marketer who used to get homework assignments to write brand apologies in grad school, I’ve been thinking about what kind of apology I would have penned.

The problem, I think, with the actual apology, is that it tries too hard to remain neutral. It is seeped in meaningless, corporate language that comes off as insincere and primarily aimed at minimizing PR damage. It doesn’t really say “we care” so much as it says, “please don’t stop buying our products.”

In some senses, this is a wise strategic maneuver. Politics of any kind has long been considered the third rail of advertising, and conventional wisdom says that political stances should be avoided at any cost.

The problem is, that doesn’t work in a world where everything is political. It doesn’t work in a world where failing to say anything isn’t neutral, but tacitly complicit. In world where black men are being murdered in the street and incarcerated at alarming rates, you can’t respond to concerns of racism with a shruggie and an “our bad.” If you want to apologize, you need to do more than that.

Interesting, another story in the headlines this weekend came from the NFL, where Vice President Pence walked out of a game after some players knelt during the national anthem. Afterwards, I was struck by the statement of 49ers player Eric Reid:

This is what systemic oppression looks like – a man with power comes to the game, tweets a couple things out and leaves the game with an attempt to thwart our efforts.  

And in many ways, that’s what the Dove ad – and the inevitable “racist or not?” debate that followed – comes down to.

This is what systemic oppression looks like.

It’s not Dove’s fault they made an ad that was interpreted as racist. It is the collective fault of a society in which white is implicitly assumed to mean better. Of a society in which certain perspectives and narratives are constantly and consistently marginalized and pushed out of the collective consciousness. How many people of color worked on that Dove ad, do you think? How many people of color were involved in the concept? In the editing?

The ad isn’t the disease, it is a symptom.

As I’ve been thinking about it, I’ve become even more disappointed that Dove didn’t take advantage of the opportunity. That they didn’t apologize more fully and meaningfully. The ad was problematic, sure, but if they were serious about being a bastion of diversity, the mistake also set them up for heroism.

They could have come out so strong on this, could have come out acknowledging that they failed – that we all fail, because we’re embedded in a system of white supremacy where it’s easy, from a position of privilege, to miss the offense you can cause. Because no advertisement has ever implied that “people like you” are dirty, it never crossed your team’s mind that this could be a concern.

They could have said that they’re doing their best to unlearn harmful social norms, to educate themselves to do better in the future. They could have said that mistakes are inevitable, and they appreciate people calling them out when they happen. They could have said that we’re all a little bit racist because we live in a racist society. They could have said they’re doing their best to change that, to fight against it every day.

They could have said so much in their apology. They could have said so much more than a half-hearted “missed the mark.” They could have – and they should have. That’s what I would recommend if I were on Dove’s PR team.

Of course – this may be the reason I don’t work in corporate advertising.

In the short half-life of scandals and outrage these days, I know it already seems like forever ago, but I wanted to take a minute to reflect on the “Kendall Jenner Pepsi ad” debacle of 2017. In the ad, reality star/model Jenner “throws off the chains of the modeling industry,” joining a Black Lives Matter protest, and ultimately bringing “everyone together by … handing a cop a Pepsi.”

You can see, perhaps, the problem.

There is plenty to analyze in terms of what is wrong with the ad, but, as someone with a background in marketing, I find myself more interested in a related question: how did the ad get made?

Interestingly, Pepsi used an in-house firm to design the ad – a move which many in agency life fingered as the culprit. If only Pepsi had had an outside perspective, an external agency with a beat on the broader culture, such an ad would never have been made. While there’s no way to know if that may have been a mitigating factor, ad agencies have made their fair share of gaffes, too.

But whether the ad was created by an in-house firm or an outside ad agency, it would have needed to go through numerous iterations and revisions. Numerous people must have looked at the ad concept, script, and footage. And none of them seemingly walked away questioning whether the ad could face backlash.

Now, I don’t know the demographics of the marketers who made this ad, but I’d bet good money that the majority of them were white.

And while that may be an implicit assumption which goes hand in hand with the very notion that this ad was created, it is worth pausing for a moment and reflecting on this.

When company’s make blunders like this, we shouldn’t just mock them and wonder how they got so out of touch. We more or less know, sociologically speaking, exactly how they got out of touch.

When everyone reviewing an ad is more or less the same, we shouldn’t be surprised when they turn out tone-deaf material.

The outrage here shouldn’t just be about one ad or about one company; we should all be outraged that we live in such a deeply segregated society that in a whole room full of people it is hardly surprising that not one black voice was heard.

The interjection “whoa” – defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as: a command to a horse to stop or stand still” or “a general interjection expressing surprise, delight, etc.” has been in use since the early 19th century.

Consider, for example, the use of the word as an intransitive verb in an 1838 issue of New Sporting Magazine: “He..climbed up the fence, ‘whoaing’ and crying to his horse to ‘stand still’.”

There is some evidence that the word has existed since long before that. One etymological dictionary, for example, dates the word to the 1620s; defining it as “a cry to call attention from a distance, a variant of who.”

But in the age of the internet, a funny thing has started happening:

Whoa. W. H. O. A. has more and more frequently come to be spelled as ‘woah’, as if the ‘h’ is precariously trying to escape from the whole messy situation.

In 2013, Slate wrote a whole piece on the gaining popularity of the wrong / new spelling: “All things considered, it’s been a banner year for “whoa,” no matter how you prefer to spell it,” they write.

And, as Mashable points out, the ACLU and Merriam-Webster dictionary recently sorted the whole thing on Twitter:

“We don’t include [woah] as a variant,” Merriam-Webster wrote in response to a query from the ACLU, “but we’re pretty sure you still have the right to say it.”

That is, after all, what it means for English to be a living language.

I’ve been reading a lot lately about the communication channels people leverage to stay in touch with each other. A particularly engaging series of articles begins with panic about the results of the 2004 General Social Survey (GSS): As McPherson, Smith-Lovin, and Brashears write, the modal respondent reports having no confident with whom they “discuss important matters.” That is down from a modal response of 3 in 1985.

Perhaps the most amusing response comes from Claude Fischer, who seems to think technical or human error is the most likely culprit of the precipitous drop – a claim he validates convincingly by showing that the 2004 GSS is poorly aligned with other relevant data.

But a broader line of inquiry is raised by these findings: just what does it mean to “discuss important matters” and how has our collective understanding of that question changed?

McPherson et al argue that the decrease in confidants could in fact be an artifact of modern life:    if people interpret “discuss” as requiring face-to-face interaction, and they have replaced such modes with phone or internet communication, they may find themselves no “discussing,” per se.

There is some reason to doubt this interpretation – most notably the work of Baym, Zhang, and Lin which finds that among college students in 2004, “the internet was used nearly as often as the telephone, however, face-to-face communication was far more frequent.”

Communication, however, has changed dramatically even since 2004. A senior in college then, I was a relatively late adopter and had only had my own cell phone – a flip phone, of course – for 2 years. I had a big, clunky desktop computer and I chatted with my classmate over AIM. I wasn’t on Facebook – it wasn’t yet really a thing – and I personally didn’t use MySpace or LiveJournal. Those sites didn’t seem to be as much about keeping in touch as about broadcasting yourself. I was 19 years old and I barely knew who my self was.

Looking back now, I wouldn’t be surprised at all if most of my conversations were face-to-face. While my phone and the internet provided some shortcuts and enhancements – face to face was the only way to really have a conversation.

Now I Snapchat my nieces every morning.

Personally, I would interpret the phrase “discuss” more broadly; I discuss important matter with people over the internet all the time. But what’s more interesting in this discussion is the arguably old-fashioned reticence to let go of face-to-face as being the only meaningful mode of communication.

But that, I think, undersells the richness of communication that is possible today – and it under appreciate’s people’s ability to leverage those communication channels.

It is easy, I suppose, to roll one’s eyes and claim that kids these days don’t know what it really means to have a conversation – but I think that is too much an oversimplification; and doesn’t give nearly enough credit to young people who want to communication, who are able to communicate, and who are fully capable of leveraging new channels and technology to discuss important matters in ways that were simply not possible before.

I have a strong and general dislike for portmanteaus – words which have “two meanings packed up into one word,” as Humpty-Dumpty tells Alice in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass.

I mention this definition because it was the first use of “portmanteau” for this purpose. An origin which is particularly amusing when you consider that our egg-shaped friend was clearly bloviating and most likely invented all the definitions he elects to confer on poor Alice.

But I digress.

At the time of Carroll’s writing, a portmanteau was most commonly known in English as a suitcase which opened into two equal sections. Thus a single word such as “slithy” is a portmanteau – in Dumpty’s reckoning – between the two component words “lithe” and “slimy.”

The word comes from the French porte-manteau, from porter, to carry, and manteau, cloak.

To be clear, I don’t have a distain for all portmanteaus. A word like ‘smog’ – smoke/fog – for example, seems to be appropriate name for something we wouldn’t otherwise have a word for. It is neither smoke nor fog, but we experience it as some novel combination of the two.

Other words, such as ‘sitcom’ – situational comedy – or ‘motel’ – motor hotel – seem like reasonable abbreviations for phrases which would otherwise be antiquated and somewhat nonsensical. Fine. I will accept these into my lexicon.

But a broader persual of English portmanteaus reveals a long list of cutesy words which are not nearly as amusing as I imagine their originators think they are. Please. Just stop it.

I suppose that this is the natural course for a living language, though. People will create portmanteaus which will be trendy for a time before most fade from use altogether. The useful ones will last.

Interestingly, portmanteaus are common in languages around the world. In French, this is described through the back-translation mot-valise (‘word-suitcase’) which subsequently became Kofferwort in German. I’m not aware of a specific Japanese term for this, but its linguistically common to combine and contract words.

While I’m in no position to comment on the worthiness of portmanteaus in those languages, the broad existence of this trend in human language seems to indicate that there is something to be said for the practice of smooshing words together and seeing what comes out.

But mostly, they just annoy me.

Because usually, we don’t need a term for whatever the portmanteau intends to convey. And if we don’t need some cutesy, made-up name for some thing that may or may not even need to exist, let us, please, just stick with the real words we already have.