Ellen’s Digital Campaign Team Completely Failed To Rescue Her Tarnished Image
By: Alice Lemée
Tags: Social Media, Television, Culture, Entertainment, Digital Marketing

It was time for Ellen’s digital campaign team to get to work. PR disasters aren’t uncommon in the entertainment industry, and things seemed salvageable. After all, Ellen had been a staple in television for nearly two decades and had over 3,000 episodes documenting proof of giveaways, awkwardly adorable dancing, and warm celebrity interviews.

There’s no direct evidence of the exact approach Ellen’s digital campaign team took when addressing the crisis. However, when examining the celebrity responses, one can’t help but suspect that it’s a concerted effort.

The team hit the ground running and it wasn’t long until multiple celebrities began posting their support towards the star, recounting their pleasantries with Ellen as a way to solidify her iconic kind-hearted image.

In situations like this, it isn’t uncommon for a digital strategy team to create a shared Google Drive toolkit full of assets to use to address a PR crisis. A resource like this will have pre-written captions, numerical facts to sprinkle in the copy if need be, and carefully selected images sized correctly for each social media platform.

Jay Leno was one of the first celebrities to go public and show solidarity with the star, posted on Twitter, “I don’t discard a 40-year friendship on hearsay. The Ellen I know has raised over $125 million dollars for charity and has always been a kind and decent person. I fully support her. Jay Leno”.

Everything from the two spaces between the punctuation marks to the “Jay Leno” signature at the end of the Tweet screams bad copy. Oddly formulaic and specific, Leno’s Tweet mentions Ellen’s exact numerical contribution to charity, a strange brag considering philanthropy doesn’t absolve people from being a genuinely terrible human being. Not to mention, one must ask themselves what kind of friend keeps tabs on the exact amount of money their pal has donated to charity on the cuff. It adds to the suspicion that the numbers were most likely fed to Leno offscreen, then copy and pasted to his Tweet.

Looking past the awkward structure of the post, it additionally completely misses the mark by addressing the wrong topic. Perhaps Ellen is a good friend, in which case, wonderful. But the issue isn’t about Ellen being a bad friend. It’s about how Ellen behaves as an employer.

Yet, Ellen’s celebrity circle continued to make its rounds, eager to prove how nice she is…to other celebrities. Kevin Hart took to Instagram to reveal his take on the ordeal and posted,

“It’s crazy to see my friend go thru what she’s going thru publicly. I have known Ellen for years and I can honestly say that she’s one of the dopest people on the fucking planet. She has treated my family and my team with love and respect from day 1. The internet has become a crazy world of negativity….we are falling in love with peoples down fall. It’s honestly sad…When did we get here? I stand by the ones that I know and that I love. Looking forward to the future where we get back to loving one another….this hate shit has to stop. Hopefully it goes out of style soon….This post is not meant to disregard the feelings of others and their experiences….It’s simply to show what my experiences have been with my friend. Love you for life Ellen..”.

While one wouldn’t naturally think of Ellen as “the dopest” human being, Hart’s post raises eyebrows for a plethora of other reasons, whether the words are his own, or if he was given a baseline from the digital campaign team to improvise on.

His attempt to vaguely blame “the internet” for Ellen’s downwards spiral is nearsighted. The internet wasn’t responsible for firing an employee asking for a bereavement day to attend a family funeral. It wasn’t involved with an executive from the Ellen show telling a Black woman “they only know the names of the white people who work there.” What the internet was responsible for was providing the platform to spread the word about these incidences and letting internet users make their own judgments.

The internet wasn’t responsible for firing an employee asking for a bereavement day to attend a family funeral. It wasn’t involved with an executive from the Ellen show telling a Black woman “they only know the names of the white people who work there.”

It’s interesting that Ellen’s digital strategy team would pass a post from Hart, as the two don’t have a frictionless path. Last year, Hart stepped down from hosting the 2019 Oscars after the resurfacing of past homophobic tweets. He shortly appeared afterward on the show, discussing the ordeal with Ellen. During the interview, Ellen went on to defend him, saying,

“As a gay person, I am sensitive to all of that. You’ve already expressed that it’s not being educated on the subject, not realizing how dangerous those words are, not realizing how many kids are killed for being gay or beaten up every day…You have grown, you have apologized, you are apologizing again right now. You’ve done it. Don’t let those people win — host the Oscars.”

The interview caused a divisive rift on Twitter. Ellen faced considerable backlash as she was accused of giving Hart a pass on his homophobic comments and allowing him to quietly dismiss his ignorance without accountability. In the end, Kevin Hart did not host the 2019 Oscars.

The list of curated celebrities who’ve publicly supported Ellen goes on. Diane Keaton posted an Instagram post of the two on the show, with her unnecessarily loud caption reading, “I HAVE ALWAYS ENJOYED MY VISITS TO THE ELLEN SHOW. I’VE SEEN HOW THE AUDIENCE EXUDES HAPPINESS AND GRATITUDE. SHE GIVES BACK TO SO MANY INCLUDING ME.” Katy Perry chimed in on Twitter, adding, “…I want to acknowledge that I have only ever had positive takeaways from my time with Ellen & on the @theellenshow. I think we all have witnessed the light & continual fight for equality that she has brought to the world through her platform for decades.”

At the end of the day, it’s irrelevant if Ellen is backed up by a dozen or a hundred of her celebrity friends and former guests. The message from the elite circle remains one-dimensional and privileged as they speak from positions of power and fame. Because they are not one of Ellen’s employees, their voice isn’t valuable when it comes to addressing or correcting the toxic work environment that Ellen enabled on her watch.