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Approval Is Not Judgment

In September, Converse withdrew a campaign image and apologized for it. The image is not the interesting part. The approval path is — because every organization reading this has the same one.

The question everyone asks is whether the brand should have pulled it.

I understand why that is the question. It is not the one that decides whether this happens to you.

A withdrawal is a judgment about an image the public has already seen. The failure that matters happened weeks earlier, in a room, before anyone outside the company had an opinion — in a review that passed every gate and asked none of the questions that would have caught it.

I want to be precise about where the lesson sits, because the temptation is to make the photograph the subject. The photograph was read as an evocation of two of the most charged images in American life: the hood of the Ku Klux Klan and the hanging figure of a lynching. That reading is the story’s center of gravity, and it arrived inside a longer and unresolved conversation about race in which the cost of a misreading is not borne evenly. It is not, however, where the lesson for an operating team sits.

The lesson is in the process that let one frame reach millions of people. That process is not unique to Converse; it is, with minor variations, the one most organizations run. This is an audit of it: the facts, the failure, the first 72 hours, and what I would have built before the moment arrived.

What happened

On September 20, 2026, Converse removed a campaign image and issued an apology. The photograph was a single frame from a longer video: the K-pop artist Karina in a skirt, holding a pair of Chuck 70 sneakers. Critics read the wedge of light across the skirt as a Klan hood, and the angle of the hanging sneakers as the posture of a lynched figure.

Within days the brand confirmed that it was reviewing how the image had been approved. It declined to identify the makers, say whether an outside agency had touched the work, describe what review it cleared before publication, or confirm that anyone had objected while the image was still fixable — or even name the country where the campaign had been developed.

That refusal is the most revealing fact in the story. Everything else was legible in the photograph.

The commercial stakes were not trivial. Converse’s revenue has fallen by roughly 44 percent over two years, and the brand is mid-reset inside Nike. A withdrawn campaign wastes production and media spending. The cost that will not appear on the next earnings report is harder to price: whether the brand remains trusted with the attention it is working to win back.

The instinctive explanation is the wrong one

The default reading is that no one reviewed the advertisement. That is almost certainly false.

Here is what I see in my work. The room is rarely empty. A brand this size publishes nothing without approvals — several layers of them, across legal, marketing, brand and an outside agency. What dissolves is not the review. It is the distance between review and judgment, and it comes apart in three places.

Speed. The week-long review of a decade ago now happens in a morning of chat messages, compressed to the tempo of the feeds the work must serve. The compression is adaptation, not carelessness — and it is where context is lost.

Fractional responsibility. Stefanie Boyer, who teaches marketing at Bryant University, describes the lane-keeping: legal weighs exposure, marketing weighs strategy, the agency defends the idea. Each function signs its own column; none signs the whole page. As the brand consultant Yanique DaCosta observed, “The number of people that are involved in execution goes up, but the number who personally are responsible for the impact goes down.”

The curse of creative context. The makers of an advertisement hold its whole biography — the brief, the drafts, the intent behind every choice. The public holds one frame on a screen, and reads it through whatever history they carry. The marketing scholar Shailendra Pratap Jain gives that distance a name — the “curse of creative context”: maker and audience are never looking at the same object.

“Every company needs someone in the room whose job it is to raise a hand and say, ‘This could hurt us.’”

Notice what that sentence is not about. Not taste. Not legal exposure. Not the brand’s intent. It is about a person in the room with the standing to stop the work while it is still stoppable — a role, not a temperament. That seat is the one most approval chains leave empty, because it belongs to no function’s job description.

The three forces and the missing seat describe the same thing: a pipeline with many sign-offs and no owner. Every box ticked — and no one in the room asking the only question that decides the outcome: how will this land on someone who has none of our context?

What I would do in the first 72 hours

This is the work that carries a clock. The first three days set the trajectory — and most organizations spend them defending a process rather than understanding it.

• 1.Freeze the surface, not the frame. Withdraw the whole campaign, not just the flagged asset — scheduled placements, paid media, retail screens, ambassador posts. Remove one image, and the other frames carry the same reading, ready to re-ignite the story a week later.
• 2.Name one owner of the narrative. One voice, one source of truth, one place for updates. In a story moving at this speed, the second most damaging thing after the image is a company with no single account of itself.
• 3.Map the approval path before defending it. Who saw it, who signed it, who could have stopped it — and where the question was never asked. This is not blame-hunting. It is the only way to establish whether the failure was a person, a process or a culture: three problems with three different remedies.
• 4.Answer the question the audience is actually asking. Not how the image was made — whether the company can be trusted to notice. A statement that answers the first and ignores the second reads, correctly, as evasion.
• 5.Separate the two repairs. The first is public and immediate: acknowledge plainly, in the active voice, and say what happens next. The second is internal and slow: rebuilding the judgment the pipeline lost. Confuse them, and a brand apologizes twice for the same thing.

None of that work is expensive on day one. All of it is expensive on day four.

What I would have in place before the moment arrived

A crisis response is downstream of a system. Where the system is sound, the response is a formality. Where it is not, no statement can rescue it — which is why the most valuable work here is done months in advance, and never makes the news.

Give interpretation a named seat, not a volunteer. Every approval chain already has someone protecting the brand and someone protecting the company. Almost none has a person whose sole charge is the outside view — the reader who arrives without the brief, the history, or the intention behind any of it. That role is not a formality. When everyone in the room shares one vantage point, the reading nobody holds is the one that decides the outcome. Interpretation is a function; unnamed functions are the first thing dropped when the deadline moves.

Review the finished asset once, at full context. Siloed approval is how a campaign clears every gate and fails the only test that matters. Boyer puts the question plainly: “Who is looking at the whole thing through the eyes of the customer?” One answer, one meeting, the finished asset in the room — the whole thing, seen the way a stranger sees it.

Protect testing as a gate, not a postmortem. Brands are producing more creative than ever on a testing budget that barely moves — which is how work that had no business shipping finds its way to the public. Consumer testing, increasingly AI-assisted, is not a luxury line item; it is the least expensive insurance in the pipeline. It catches the reading the creators cannot unsee.

Decide, in advance, what attention is worth. Engagement shows up in the dashboard within the hour, and that is the trap: a campaign can look like a win while it is quietly spending trust. Boyer’s caution applies here — attention and effectiveness are not the same measure, and five million people talking about a brand is not the same as more people trusting it. Steve Inguanta, an advertising-operations executive, draws the corollary: once attention becomes the primary currency, controversy presents itself as an acceptable business risk. Boards should be told the difference, in writing, before the next campaign that deliberately courts it.

Why this belongs in a board packet

Earlier this month, in this space, I argued that trust is a system outcome rather than a personality trait — that reputation is constructed in the unremarkable quarters before scrutiny arrives, and that a company walks its reputation into a capital event exactly the way it walks its balance sheet into one. This is that argument from the other direction: a brand with every approval in place, and no system underneath them.

The Converse image is a symptom. The system that produced it is a structure — and structures are portable. The same approval path that passed one photograph also signs off on a pricing change, a restructuring memo, an executive’s visible moment, a data policy. It is the same machinery every time.

That is why I do not treat this as a marketing case study. Reputation is not made in the advertisement. It is made in the review — in the half hour when a company decides, collectively and usually without saying so, whether anyone in the room is responsible for how the work lands.

The organizations that avoid the next version of this story will not be the ones with the most reviewers. They will be the ones that never mistake a review for a judgment — and that keep one person in the room whose task is to look at the finished work the way a stranger will.

Good words take time. Great ones take Intention.

Clarity creates momentum. Alignment sustains it.

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