ViacomCBS' 8 minutes and 46 seconds "I Can't Breathe" blackout tribute to George Floyd was "corporate wokeness" that worked

The Week

"Suffocating a man takes less time than bringing a kettle of water to boil. It take less time than many Americans go between glances at their phone. It takes less time than the standard television commercial break," says Jeva Lange. "But measured out a second at a time, those nearly nine minutes are an 'eternity,' according to thousands of people whose regular programming was interrupted this week by their TV screens going dark in memory of George Floyd, who died in police custody on Memorial Day. From MTV to Nickelodeon to HGTV to Comedy Central, CBS Sports, and even Spotify, the PSA ticked off each second that a white Minneapolis police officer pressed a knee down on Floyd's neck as he begged 'I can't breathe' 16 times before going unconscious. Though most instances of branded wokeness deserve our scrutiny, and often scorn, the nine-minute-long tributes to Floyd are a rare effective corporate gesture, spreading awareness of excruciating police brutality while remaining mostly distanced from corporate, capitalist aims." Lange adds that "creating woke advertising that doesn't come off as opportunistic, exploitative, or worse, hypocritical, is extremely difficult. There are at least as many misfires as there are successes (a perusal of the sappy 'coronavirus commercials' being one revealing recent example), and brands seem to be especially bad when it comes to finding something meaningful to say about race. "