By now, the free world has become privy to the awful video of Ray Rice‘s lowest moment, when he leveled his then-fiancee. The emergence of that footage has galvanized everyone around the plight of abused women, and I hope that some good comes out of this. I am not smart enough to comment on any of the social aspects of this case except to say that my heart goes out to the victims of abuse anywhere. My expertise is in marketing and technology, and I must say that there are some lessons for companies that should not be ignored.
This incident should put marketers on notice that:
- Emotional videos move people in powerful ways. Note that no new facts came out in the case. To anyone even remotely following what happened, it was abundantly clear from previously available information what had happened in that elevator. But when people saw that tape, it had a power that no written word had. Think about this. What about all the abusive incidents where there is no camera? We know in our rational minds that they happened. We know that the victims didn’t make things up. Men have been found guilty. Men have even pled guilty, so there is no doubt about what happened. Still, without a video, it lacks the emotional impact. Note the power of an emotional video to not only change the conversation but also to reach many more people. I’d love to have a buck for every solemn news anchor who intoned, “We need to warn you that this is a disturbing video is tough to watch” before showing it 600 times. Yes, if it bleeds, it leads. Emotional videos move people powerfully and they also reach many more people than any other form of information.
- When making decisions, act as if everything you know is already public. The NFL had to know that there was an excellent chance that such a video existed, even if they hadn’t seen it. (I’ll let smarter people investigate whether they did see it or were aware that it existed.) It matters not whether they saw it–they could easily imagine what it showed, they could assume that the video did exist, and most importantly, they needed to assume that it would eventually surface, because that is the natural order of digital information. If the NFL had made that assumption, they would have taken stronger action the first time around. Big Data means that you have to assume the evidence exists, that it is stored somewhere, and your decisions need to hold up when that evidence surfaces.
- The bigger you are, the more is expected of you. As you watch the NFL’s image blasted all over talk radio, cable news, and TMZ clones, you might say to yourself, “Well, that will never happen to us.” And you might be right. But what could happen to you could be just as bad. The reason that the NFL is being excoriated everywhere is because their customers are everyone. If you have a sleepy B2B business, maybe you won’t end up on CNN when your VP of Supply Chain Management abuses some poor victim on video, but you might end up on YouTube in front of all of your customers. If all of your customers see it, it doesn’t matter whether it was on TMZ or YouTube. And your customers expect better behavior and better decisions when you are more powerful, as the NFL is. They expect better investigations. They expect that if anyone could unearth the video, you could. It doesn’t matter whether this is fair–what matters is it’s true. Outsize companies suffer from outsize expectations.
If you aren’t dealing with these new realities as you make decisions in your business, you are waiting to become the next poster child for corporate irresponsibility. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
