These ad creatives are flipping Trump’s insults against Harris into celebratory merch
These ad creatives are flipping Trump’s insults against Harris into celebratory merch
A new merch store sells ‘Kamabla’ bracelets and other items inspired by Trump insults—and donates the proceeds to the Harris-Walz campaign.
It should probably go without saying that Vice President Kamala Harris never “happened to turn Black,” as former president Donald Trump recently accused her of doing. Incredibly, it did go without saying—at least as far as Harris herself was concerned. Rather than rebut Trump’s insult, she dismissed it out of hand and moved right along.
A grassroots collective called Creatives for Harris wasn’t quite as ready to move on, however. Taking a page out of the VP’s book and not getting bogged down in the “how dare he!” of it all, the group instead channeled its exhaustion with Trump into a piece of merch that flips the insult on its head. The group created a Kamala-branded mug that actually, ingeniously, turns black when filled with coffee. It’s but one of many items in the team’s just-launched Insults for Good initiative, which spins merch-gold out of slanderous straw.
Creatives for Harris started when marketing strategist Jonathan Jacobs and brand strategist Britton Taylor decided to check out a burgeoning affinity group called Men for Harris—one of countless iterations that have sprung up over the past five weeks. (Ahoy, Swifties for Harris, Introverts for Harris, etc.) What they quickly realized is that a lot of affinity groups desperately needed creative resources like logos, social media assets, and videos. The two ad-industry vets decided the best way to get involved would be to bring together a gang of fellow creatives to address those needs. They put up something akin to the Bat-Signal for Harris on LinkedIn, hoping to find 200 creatives receptive to the idea. The number of strategists, creative directors, and even some agency founders turned out to be closer to a thousand.
“There’s traditionally been a pretty big firewall between political campaigns and the commercial advertising world,” Taylor says. “But now, there’s all this pent-up optimism and a willingness for all these creative people in the industry to get involved and to do something.”
Kramer and Echenagucia were jamming on the idea of doing something with Tampon Tim, a nickname that Trump used recently to describe Harris’s running mate, Tim Walz. (As governor of Minnesota, Walz made free tampons widely available in public school restrooms.) The pair made each other laugh while coming up with Tampon Tim stickers to slap on Tampax boxes around America, and realized they could fill a whole online store with items inspired by Trump insults—and donate all the proceeds to the Harris-Walz campaign.
Beyond the stickers and the mug, Insults for Good offers a “Kamabla” friendship bracelet, taking a cue from Trump’s frequent habit of mispronouncing Harris’s name; and a variety of Kama Kama Kama Kama Kamala-on T-shirts, a nod to Trump running mate JD Vance’s comments describing Harris as a chameleon.
“We try to be conceptual in the way we create the products,” Kramer says. “The chameleon shirt is tie-dye, for instance, to celebrate that we’re a multiracial country; and the Tampon Tim stickers underline that we should have tampons in public school restrooms.”
“It’s very much in the spirit of the Harris-Walz campaign,” adds Echenagucia, “where it’s all about positivity and hope instead of insults, negativity, and division. How do we turn that behavior into something that is positive and beneficial for everybody?”
In some ways, it may seem, in 2024, like tempting fate to repurpose Trumpian insults into slogans and merch. No doubt, there are Hillary Clinton supporters who still feel a twinge of trauma in recalling all the Nasty Woman T-shirts that cropped up in 2016 after Trump’s debate-night insult toward Clinton. (Trump supporters, it must be noted, took a similar tack by reclaiming Clinton’s notorious “basket of deplorables” remark, in some cases permanently.) But that need not make the idea behind it verboten forever.
“In 2016, we still looked at ‘nasty woman’ more with ridicule and an inability to believe that it was actually being wielded and weaponized by the other side,” says Jacobs. “Whereas now that we’re facing Trump for the third presidential election cycle, we’re not just claiming ownership of a phrase, we’re actually gonna force a conversation about why that phrase is being utilized, why it’s a problem, and what we can do to reshape the narrative.”
A more recent example of a repurposed insult is the Dark Brandon meme. After a year of Trump supporters making “Let’s Go Brandon” merch to commemorate a famous anti-Biden expletive, President Biden’s team ran with it in fall 2022, making Dark Brandon images of Biden with laser eyes, pushing the Inflation Reduction Act through, whether everyone was on board or not. Embracing the insult took away some of its sting.
Repurposing “Let’s Go Brandon,” though, worked best when Biden was doing well, also when he wasn’t embracing Dark Brandon himself as, say, at the 2023 White House Correspondents’ Dinner. The meme abruptly died earlier this summer, when Biden tweeted a photo of himself holding a soda can that read “Dark Brandon’s Secret Sauce”—just before his June 27 debate with Trump. The performance that followed is a primary reason why Harris will now be taking Biden’s place in the next presidential debate, on September 10, and that photo is now a painful reminder of why politicians ought not bend over backwards to be perceived as being in on the joke about them.
“Since we come from marketing, we all know that the most powerful way to have your brand recommended to another person is through word-of-mouth marketing and people telling their friends about it,” says Jacobs. “It’s not the brand coming down and communicating that.”
In other words, there’s more power in a group of creatives being inspired by Harris to make “Kamabla” friendship bracelets than there would be if Harris wore one to the debate stage.
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