Brands that censor CX put customer relationships at risk.

I've watched this this guy for a while now. He's a popular YouTuber with 12MM Subscribers and known for his authenticity as well as diversity of content. Today he posted a video about losing a brand deal.

Here's the tea.

Brand does a collaboration with him.

He posts a music video.

Brand dumps him before pushing their collaboration to market.

Here's why we need to have this conversation.

Charley is one of the brightest and more relevant voices on the internet right now and this situation is indicative of advertising and marketing challenges we've all faced when trying to get something "good" into the market.

Brands that want lasting relationships with customers need to trust them to know what they want. We shouldn't be trying to "dumb it down for consumers."

And if we're being honest, filtering content based on legacy corporate policies isn't a savvy approach to the content landscape overall, nor is it respectful to audiences or content creators on any level.

And speaking as an advertising industry veteran with more than 35 years working with major brands, I offer this word of warning to brand managers, CMOs, CXOs, CEOs everywhere - when you develop campaigns from a place of fear instead of customer experience, then in the end, your remaining audiences will be Karen's and trolls who aren't loyal to anyone but themselves.

To be clear, I'm not advocating offensive or irresponsible content. I'm just saying that dumping a content creator based on a tertiary piece of work shows a lack of empathy for your customers, misses the purpose of collaborations and demonstrates a misunderstanding of everything that's happening in media today.

The lesson

Back in the day, customers had content thrust upon them for by a small group of channels and in that day and age, putting the FILTHY video next to your brand might not go over well. But today customers SEARCH for the content they want and in this case, to find the video in question, customers would have had to search through Charley's content to find it (and doing so, to find more of HIS content). Audiences would have never found the video by searching the brand name.

From a wider perspective, this art vs brand tug of war played out with Keven Hart and the Academy Awards a while back. Note that both Charley and Kevin took the same stance "I'm fine with it, and going to keep doing my art, my way" stance and I suspect most successful creators will do the same. Which is why audiences love them.

Lastly, companies need to understand that content creators are different than actors and actresses in that, hired talent plays a role of conformity for a brand message while creators are a new paths to audience engagement.

For the record

I watched the FILTHY video that the brand felt was inappropriate. And yes, it's not for everyone - but what really is?

My take on things:

Customer Experience is a business approach meant to create better relationships between brands and customers. To do this, we must give customers credit for being smart people with the intelligence to form our own opinions and more importantly consume the media me want (and don't want).

I'm not saying the FILTHY video is going into my playlist, but that that's just me. Charley's fine with it and the brands should be too.