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Is it Time to Retire Roasting?

4/23/2023

18 Comments

 
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by David Hagenbuch - professor of marketing at Messiah University -
​author of 
Honorable Influence - founder of Mindful Marketing 

Roasting is a nice way to bring out the natural flavors of things like meats, vegetables, and coffee, but does it bring out the best in people?  A well-known fast-food chain seems to think so, or at least it believes roasting others is a recipe for building its brand.
 
Given everyone likes to laugh, people tend to appreciate individuals and organizations that add humor to their lives.  Insurance companies like Aflac, Geico, and Progressive are well-known for luring consumers with levity via advertising slapstick, usually at the expense of their own corporate characters: Duck, Gecko, and Flo.
 
However, for five years, another company has taken a more aggressive comedic approach – Wendy’s, the ninth largest fast-food chain in America, has reasoned, ‘Why should we just laugh at ourselves, when we can laugh at you?’ 
 
To be fair, Wendy’s uses more than one type of humor.  Like the insurance companies, the fast-food chain has characters – actors pretending to be Wendy’s employees – doing and saying silly things in what are pretty appealing ads.  However, the company also uses comedy that very few organizations are bold enough to try – roasting others, even their own customers.
 
Wendy’s has long been known for using social media to spar with its burger competitors.  Typical of the trash talk that Wendy’s aims at McDonald’s is this tweet from a few years ago: “Hey @McDonalds, heard the news. Happy #NationalFrozenFoodDay to you for all the frozen beef that’s sticking around in your cheeseburgers.”
 
However, those periodic jabs pale in comparison to what Wendy’s did in 2018, when it created its only holiday of sorts, “National Roast Day,” during which it invites individual and organizations to volunteer themselves to be roasted by the restaurant.  Most recently, an animated version of its redhead, pigged-tailed namesake Wendy, the daughter of Founder Dave Thomas, imparts the insults.
 
Over the past few years, Twitter served as the platform of choice for most Roast Day putdowns, but this spring Wendy took her talents to TikTok and also tripled the length of the ribbing from one day to three.
 
A review of the video shorts shows that the roasts vary in their acrimony.  Some are pretty benign, for instance:
  • To a young woman wearing considerable eye makeup and applying lip gloss:  “Hey, it’s the girl that walked the track in Cookie Monster pajamas during gym class.”
  • To a young man who asks Wendy to roast his band’s music:  “I’d roast your music, but just like everyone else on earth, I’ve never heard it.”
 
Other roasts are more acerbic:
  • To a heavy-set young man: “I didn’t know someone without a neck could have a neck beard, but here we are.  You learn something new every day.” 
  • To a thin-framed young man who recalls Wendy’s once wrapping “underwhelming” single burger patties in foil:  “Should have expected a weak punchline from someone who looked like they’d lose an arm-wrestling match to a seven-year-old.” 
  • To a young man wearing sunglasses and a hat with a Pizza Planet logo, who speaks with a slight Southern accent:  “Kids, this is what happens when you’re born in a truck stop bathroom.” 
 
Of course, Wendy’s didn’t invent the roast.  For that starting place, some point to 1950, the New York Friars Club, and roasts of comedians Sam Levenson and Joe E. Lewis.  While the Friars Club has continued roasting one member a year since, others also have gotten into the act, namely Dean Martin’s celebrity roasts from 1974-1984, and Comedy Central.  From 2003 through 2019, the cable channel aired one or two roasts a year of musicians, actors, and comedians, including David Hasselhoff, Charlie Sheen, and Roseanne Barr.
 
It’s unclear why Comedy Central stopped its roasts.  Some on social media claim COVID killed the biting humor, while others note that the frequency of the channel’s roasts already had started to decline. There also were several very awkward exchanges along the way, including a roast in 2016 when instead of belittling roastee Rob Lowe, many of the roasters heaped brutal insults on fellow roaster and conservative commentator Ann Coulter.  Retired NFL quarterback Peyton Manning compared her to a horse.


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It might be naïve, but maybe Comedy Central’s cancellation of roasting had something to do with heightened sensibilities and introspection – i.e., What exactly are we doing here and what it’s greater social impact? 
 
Understandably, some would want to push back on such criticism of Comedy Central’s specials and Wendy’s National Roast Day with plausible arguments like:
  • Don’t take it so seriously; it’s comedy; it’s supposed to be funny!
  • Everyone needs to laugh at themselves.
  • Those people volunteered to be roasted.
 
Although each of those arguments has some merit, overall, they lack a good read of the room.  In other words, they miss the bigger picture of what’s happening in our world, the tenuous turn society has taken, and how roasting provides poor but enticingly imitable examples of how people might interact with each other.
 
Even a casual observer can see  that society has become increasingly divided ideologically and in other ways.  Although such schisms have likely always existed, what’s new is the freedom and numerous ways people now have to berate not only individuals who think differently but also those who fail to act and look like they do.
 
Of course, social media has been a main conduit for that verbal abuse, allowing people to unfurl personal attacks with the protection of partial, if not complete, anonymity and to do so at physically, psychologically, and socially safe distances, i.e., without meeting their ‘adversaries’ face-to-face, learning their stories, and truly understanding them.
 
Many young people, in particular, seek validation from social media, allowing their self-image to rise and fall based on likes, shares, and comments, often from people they don’t know.  Those fleeting rewards teach them what’s valued and motivate future behavior, often aimed at realizing similar temporary validation.
 
What’s more, people also learn social norms vicariously, or by observing others and seeing how society responds to their actions.  So, if caustic criticism of a person gains thousands of likes on social media, thousands of others may reason, ‘I’d like to receive that kind of response; I think I’ll try that.’ 
 
There-in lies the real danger of Wendy’s roasts:  They’re invitations to imitate derisive communication at a place and time when society is already deeply divided and young people feel stigmatized by social media.
 
Fortunately, some other organizations not only recognize these serious societal rifts, they’re trying to remedy them.  One such company is the global consumer goods producer Unilever.  In keeping with its aim to be “purpose-led,” its personal care brand Dove has taken special efforts to battle the culture of criticism by doing things such as:
  • Challenging TikTok’s bold glamour filter, which “sets unrealistic and harmful beauty expectations for girls and women.”
  • Pushing for legislation to protect kids’ self-esteem, given the rise in mental health issues associated with social media use.
 
As someone who uses humor generously in his classes, I probably should be one of last people to criticize anyone who seeks to leverage the very legitimate value of laughter.  However, roasting breaks the boundaries of what can be considered socially beneficial “playful teasing.”
 
From my 30+ years on the frontlines of customer interaction and college education, a little good-natured ribbing is not just tolerated, it’s often very desirable, provided the teaser:
  • Already has a good relationship with those being teased
  • Teases themself, or uses self-deprecating humor
  • Pays many more compliments than teases
  • Never teases about things that are sensitive or cannot be changed
  • Doesn’t focus the teasing on just one or two people
 
Regrettably, Wendy’s roasts fulfill few of these criteria.  Also, given the nasty nature of animated Wendy, the company’s website description of how its founder Thomas chose the logo is both ironic and sad:  “He felt that the logo of a smiling, whole-some little girl with the name ‘Wendy’s Old-Fashioned Hamburgers’ would be the place where you went for a hamburger the way you used to get them . . .”
 
Given the expansion of its self-made holiday, the fast-food chain’s burger sales must be benefiting; however, the butt of the joke is a society that shouldn’t have to tolerate more divisiveness or attacks on individuals’ self-esteem.  Wendy’s deserves kudos for wanting to make people laugh, but unfortunately it has cooked up a biggie serving of “Single-Minded Marketing.”
​
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18 Comments

AI Ethics Need Time

4/8/2023

6 Comments

 
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by David Hagenbuch - professor of marketing at Messiah University -
​author of 
Honorable Influence - founder of Mindful Marketing 

At the same time Major League Baseball (MLB) has made a revolutionary rule change to speed up America’s pastime, some renown business leaders have called a timeout to slow down the planet’s hottest new technology.  In a world that places a high priority on time, is it fair to ask organizations to hit pause on artificial intelligence (AI)?
 
With many believing that notoriously long baseball games have outlasted the attention spans of fans now conditioned for shorter bursts of entertainment, MLB made the game-changing addition of a pitch clock, which already seems to be serving its purpose of expediting play.
 
However, sports don’t always imitate life.  Concerned about the meteoric rise of AI and its potential abuses, over 18,000 people have signed the Future Life Institute’s open letter that asks all AI labs to “immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.”  Among the notable signatories are tech leaders Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak and 2020 presidential candidate Andrew Yang.
 
Most of us have heard of at least some ethical infractions attributed to AI that range from the art tool Midjourney slyly outfitting Pope Francis in a longline white puffer coat to complaints that an uncensored chatbot continually offends human decency.
 
In light of such concerns, some marketing professionals have joined ranks with their tech colleagues and said that the proposed pause on AI development is, akin to Keebler cookies, “an uncommonly good idea.”  On an even larger scale, Italy recently became the first western nation to ban ChatGPT.
 
However, not everyone agrees that an AI pause is necessary.  While major brands like Coke, Duolingo, and Expedia are increasingly leveraging the power of ChatGPT for their digital marketing, Microsoft has gone much further, making multimillion dollar investments in Open AI, the app’s owner.
 
Also questioning the prudence of the open letter and proposed AI pause are “some prominent AI ethicists” and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, who has said, “I don’t really understand who they’re saying could stop, and would every country in the world agree to stop, and why to stop.”
 
Gates’ issue with the AI pause doesn’t seem to be so much that he believes it’s a bad idea in principle as he fears its unilateral implementation, i.e., many around the world won’t honor the halt.  As Microsoft’s largest single stockholder, Gates understandably doesn’t want the company to fall behind in the AI race. 
 
Gates elaborated on his AI perspective saying, “Clearly there’s huge benefits to these things… what we need to do is identify the tricky areas.”
 

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Coming from someone who is a prolific reader and arguably one of humanity’s greatest intellects, “tricky” is a very interesting choice of words.
 
Gates probably didn’t mean “tricky” in the sense of sly or deceptive, but rather he chose the adjective to convey that AI issues are complex, delicate, and intricate.  Either way, the word is very informative for the approach to ethics that should be taken with AI.
 
When a bomb squad comes upon an unrecognized incendiary device that it needs to deactivate, and one of its members says, “This is going to be tricky,” it’s probably not code to pick up the pace and rush headlong into the defusing process.  Instead, “tricky” would likely signal to everyone on the team that they should slow down and think, “How exactly do we want to go about this?”
 
Based on the educated opinions of tech experts who know much more about the potential risks and rewards of AI than do most of us, the transcendent and ever-evolving technology is potentially explosive, or “uncommonly” “tricky.”  Some of the potential pitfalls include information accuracy, privacy, intellectual property, offensive content, attribution, and impact on humans' livelihoods.
 
When it comes to tricky ethical issues, it’s not only okay to pump the brakes, hit pause, and take a beat – it’s desirable.  Moral choices shouldn’t be rushed; rather, they often benefit from more time to allow for:
  • Consideration of other opinions: Any given person’s, organization’s, or industry’s perspective is naturally limited and usually biased to some extent.  It’s very helpful, therefore, to engage other stakeholders who can offer divergent views, or at least ask good questions.
  • Better projection of likely outcomes: A danger of rushing through a product trial is that some consequences only become known over time, after they happen.  Such a long-term delay of launching may not be practical, but additional conceptual testing is usually possible and is likely to identify other probable occurrences.
  • Deeper reflection on pertinent principles:  Identifying what specific moral issues are at play in a given situation requires very intentional analysis.  Determining what particular courses of action are decent, fair, honest, etc. requires even greater contemplation.
 
Unfortunately, a MLB pitcher facing a full count on a prolific home run hitter can no longer take extra time to gather himself before throwing the next pitch.  However, even though the game of high tech is moving at a very rapid pace, there is no pitch clock on AI ethics.
 
Gates is right that not everyone in the world will hit pause on AI development at the same time, which is concerning.  But why, then, not apply the same logic to an issue like greenhouse gases?  Certainly not every organization or nation is working to reduce their CO2 emissions; yet, Gates is, thankfully, a vocal advocate and large financial supporter of mitigation efforts.
 
In ethics, it’s not only tenuous to try to think too fast, it’s also ill-advised to reason: “Others won’t take a stand, so why should I?”  Pumping the brakes on new technology is not always needed, but given AI’s life-altering potential, some extra time to talk and reflect equals “Mindful Marketing.”


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