Mark Mason, the chief financial officer of Citigroup, wrote a public blog post on the company’s website that repeated Mr. Floyd’s pleas to the white officer kneeling on his neck: “I can’t breathe.” The advertising agency 72andSunny wrote on Instagram that “white people need to start carrying this burden” of combating racism. Reebok said in a message to “the black community” that it “stands in solidarity with you,” telling its social media followers: “We are not asking you to buy our shoes. We are asking you to walk in someone else’s.”
On Monday, Change.org will promote its largest petition ever — “Justice for George Floyd” — on taxi-top ads in New York and billboards there and in Minneapolis. The marketing campaign, funded by supporters, will be the most expensive effort of its kind for the company.
WarnerMedia brands, including HBO, TBS and the newly introduced HBO Max, changed their Twitter names to #BlackLivesMatter and quoted the black novelist James Baldwin: “Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind.”
The hashtag also appeared in posts from retailers like Nordstrom, the ice cream maker Ben Jerry’s and media companies like TikTok. YouTube promised to spend $1 million on social justice initiatives, but it quickly faced criticism that its moderation efforts against racist content have historically been weak.
“Your hypocrisy knows no bounds,” wrote Sleeping Giants, a media watchdog group, in a reply to YouTube that echoed a similar complaint against Twitter. “As a platform that has done its very best to avoid having to remove any videos from racists, white supremacists and hate mongers, you should be ashamed of even tweeting about this. Too little, too late.”
Some companies were more cautious in their approach. Target, which is based in Minneapolis and was hit by looting at a store there last week, described “a community in pain” in a blog post but never mentioned the word “black.”
Several of the businesses that expressed support have had complicated relationships with race in the past. Starbucks, which conducted sweeping anti-bias training after two black men were arrested in a store in 2018, posted a public letter on Saturday encouraging “courageous conversations.”
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/31/business/media/companies-marketing-black-lives-matter-george-floyd.html
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