Corporate social advocacy events as a window into the contemporary promotional industries

Abstract

Amid calls for corporate social responsibility to adopt an “impact orientation” (Weder, et al., 2019) and the growing significance of corporate entities and brands as sites to contest societal values through conflicts around greenwashing, online content moderation, and social advocacy, this article asks how a changed communication environment, particularly the rise of social media platforms for communication and search engines as a repository of knowledge, affects the practices of the promotional industries, and with what effects?The practices of the contemporary promotional industries increasingly include a focus on corporate social responsibility, purpose, and advocacy. Included within these behaviours are interventionist corporate practices, including advertiser boycotts of social media platforms such as YouTube and Facebook and corporate boycotts of U.S. states such as North Carolina (Author, 2020), potentially divisive public statements (Ciszek & Logan, 2018), and decisions to not stock controversial items such as certain styles of firearms (Gaither, et al., 2018). These advocacy actions can then be shared through owned online channels such as corporate blogs and social media where corporate communications teams can justify their own positions and discredit those of their opponents (Aronczyk, 2013). The ability to self-mediate an organisation’s activity is complicated in online contexts, where a participatory public may contest or undermine organisational claims (Edwards, 2020; Tombleson & Wolf, 2017).Research on corporate social advocacy has historically focused on individual cases and the potential financial benefits or detriments of corporate advocacy behaviours. While work in this area has begun to address the strategic communication considerations for organisations engaging in corporate social advocacy (Dodd and Supa, 2014; Gaither, et al., 2018; Kim & Austin, 2022; Wettstein & Baur, 2016), pressing questions remain about its broader motivations and compatibility with democratic institutions. Critical public relations scholarship argues that promotional communication plays a critical role in mediating the promise of “public representation, voice, and agency” (Cronin, 2018, p.44) in democratic countries (Cronin, 2018; Edwards, 2018; Aronczyk, 2015). This article connects research on corporate social advocacy, public relations in democratic communication, and the platformized communication environment by examining the motivations for corporate social advocacy, how advocacy events are mediated, and how the risks and rewards of participating in these kinds of communication are understood within the contemporary promotional industries.Theoretical framing: This article draws on frameworks of contestation and justification in organisational communication (Boltanski and Thevenot, 1991/2006; Edwards, 2020) to understand corporate social advocacy practices within transnational democratic communication and deliberation (Fraser, 2007). By emphasizing interaction and contestation between groups, theories of justification add new tools to understand the values that drive deliberation within the “shared cultural space” (Curtin & Gaither, 2007, p.38) provided by Circuit of Culture understandings of public relations and the promotional industries.Methods: To identify the perspectives of the promotional industries that define the marketing and public relations response to social advocacy controversies, fifteen interviews were conducted with advertising and public relations agencies, brand communication managers, national and international advertising associations, participants in advertising boycotts, and prominent activists involved with corporate advocacy.  To provide a more comprehensive understanding of contemporary practice, the interviews were combined with a document analysis of materials collected from industry events such as Advertising Week, the Business for Social Responsibility Conference, and industry publications, such as The Drum, AdWeek, the Branded newsletter, and the Conscious Advertising Network podcast.Findings: Participants saw risks to inaction or insufficient action on social advocacy issues. They also saw potential benefits for quick, credible advocacy on issues where the organisation could differentiate itself as a leader. From the perspective of participants, constant media scrutiny, online and off, a low-trust environment, and investments in stakeholder relationships exacerbated the risks and rewards of social advocacy, pushing organisations towards active engagement with a wide array of advocacy issues—sometimes a wider array of issues than they were comfortable with. The active engagement on these issues moved corporate advocacy away from rhetoric and towards tangible actions with governance implications for online content moderation and other public interest topics.Contribution: This article contributes to understanding the role legitimacy plays in the contemporary promotional industries. While the pressure to perform social advocacy is widely felt in professional communications, this research also suggests that some companies are positioned in ways that make them more accountable to internal or external pressure from stakeholders. It provides evidence of how promotional industry professionals negotiate expectations that they will live up to the “promise” of “public representation, voice, and agency” (Cronin, 2018, p.44) and notes the importance of the media environment in creating pressure for companies to respond to public issues in ways perceived as legitimate to their audiences.