Issue 5: Controversy

This is Reliable Sources, a newsletter that explores important issues in the world of marketing, but without mentioning marketing at all. You can keep reading it here on LinkedIn or on Substack if you'd like.

This was a tough issue to compile.

My process involves drawing from my own cellar of 'reliable sources' for bookmarked or brand new views about the topic of the week.

But the term "controversy" isn't easy to search for—same with "offensive" "shock" and "outrage". They compile [finger in the air] oh, about 99% of online content nowadays.

So, finding reliable sources about the nature of controversy and how it's deployed outside of marketing was - annoyingly - hard to do.

Which I guess is an interesting point—its ubiquity in definition, style, and execution.

There's a school of thought that says there's no such thing as bad publicity. In an attention-based economy, being edgy/offensive/rude/crude/lewd earns gawks, listens, gasps, and shitposts. We reap what we sow, and it's nearly always rude-boy season on the farm.

But beyond being oh-so-outrageous, what should marketers should be mindful of when courting controversy? When does it work? When does it fail? And when is it just plain... vanilla?

(TW: This issue does contain a story about rape jokes.)

As the self-proclaimed "King of All Media", Howard Stern is synonymous with shockjockyism. His case file is a whose-who of famous and infamous alike who've been dealt the Stern treatment.

But the mid 2010s marked a shift in Stern's output. More 'touchy-feely' and less 'punchy-testies'.

"By all accounts, the metamorphosis has been slow — the result of a combination of therapy, his second marriage, mainstream acceptance and a sixth sense Mr. Stern has about how to evolve with the times."

This profile of Stern from 2016 ultimately asks — and I think answers — the question, "What happens when you realise being edgy isn't sustainable?"

There's a sense that LinkedIn started to 'change' right around the time of the first Covid lockdowns in 2020. It changed from being the website you got jobs on to being a mishmash of personal branding, hot takes, and would-be thought leaders testing out TEDx material.

It hasn't escaped me. I've gone on record multiple times as saying this website is in fact, ahem, "bad". (I'm aware of the irony.)

But more than that, I noticed a movement not far removed from any counter cultural shift: What if the stuffy work social media had...rude stuff on it?

Gasp. Imagine.

And hoards of rude crude dudes did imagine, to great effect too. Chest thumping tell-it-like-it-is jocks started to tell a very deliberate stories on the platform. But as I point out in this piece, it's a song that's been played all over the internet for years.

"The truly shocking work, such as Pussy Riot's punk prayer," writes Adam Thirlwell, "... will investigate the ideology of its own making."

Thirwell's 2015 essay reflects on the concept of "shock" in art and culture. It looks back nostalgically to a time when art could genuinely shock the public, with nods to Flaubert's 'Madame Bovary' and Manet's 'Olympia'. He even suggests that in today's liberal democracies, shock is no longer possible or admissible in art. Are we all, suddenly, bohemians?

Well, set your faces to stunned.

Thirwell explores different motivations and meanings behind artistic shock, from publicity stunts to philosophical dissent. He cautions against dismissing shock as always superficial, saying that truly shocking art may be quieter today in its form, seeking to disturb conventions and address the audience in new ways.

Back in the halcyon days of 2012, comedian Daniel Tosh made some rape jokes at an LA comedy club. They went down as well as could be expected, and a female audience member informed Tosh that "rape jokes are never funny".

The comedian then had a normal one and told her it would be hilarious if she suddenly became the victim of sexual assault right there in the club.

Cue the entirely expected and entirely justified backlash.

Self-styled free-speech 'absolutists' would hold that, yes, everything can be funny. So, writer and comedian Lindy West sets about stress-testing that theory with devastating aplomb.

Earlier this year, academic Dan Kaszeta was invited to address a UK government-backed conference about chemical weapons, of which he is an expert. He was then disinvited, as an official email put it, a “check on your social media has identified materials that criticised government officials and policy”.

Despite being a government that chest-thumps free speech, its Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023 gives speakers leave to seek compensation if they are “no-platformed” and empowers the Office for Students to wrap offending institutions with a fine.

The Higher Education Policy Institute reported a survey of students which found a strong majority - 79% - thought that “Students that feel threatened should always have their demands for safety respected”. “Many people may be surprised, perhaps even unsettled”,?the report observed, “by the greater keenness of students to limit what their peers and lecturers can say and do within the law”.

“We need to devise new ways of speaking to one another, new ways of communicating across,” writes Ira Wells in her 2015 essay on disinviting speakers from Canadian universities.

The broader question, she suggests isn’t whether an offended party should be the sole arbiter of what is ‘offensive’, but whether instances of offensive speech require an offended party at all.

I’d also venture that what many call ‘free speech’ is really a want to speak unchallenged, which flies in the face of institutions designed to challenge ideas and thoughts.

With a career spanning more than 20 years, popular American shockjocks Opie & Anthony were loud, obnoxious, in your face, and relentless. They started as brothers... and ended as enemies.

This podcast series from Matt Provenzano explores the rise and fall of the FM provocateurs.

It's been a bit of a heavy issue, so here's St Vincent covering Prince's immortal "Controversy". You're welcome.