PROGRAM

BM-7 Brand Safety in the Age of Outrage

Online backlash is no longer a distant threat for today’s marketers and business leaders. While finding yourself at the center of a social media firestorm is an outright nightmare, simply watching peer brands face such crises—and imagining your own brand in their shoes—is enough to induce serious anxiety.

However, as these digital wildfires become increasingly commonplace, the core dilemmas keeping marketers awake at night have fundamentally shifted. We are seeing a growing number of cases where an excessive fear of backlash forces brands to compromise their core messaging, dilute their campaigns, or abandon crucial initiatives entirely. Merely studying past case studies to learn "safe" ways of expression is no longer enough. For modern marketers, the to-do list for navigating online outrage has expanded far beyond simple avoidance.

The paradigm must shift from "How do we avoid backlash?" to "How do we confront and manage the risk?" This session will begin by redefining what truly constitutes a "firestorm" in the first place. From there, we will explore critical questions: What is our threshold for acceptable risk? And when executing campaigns that carry inherent risks, how should we effectively manage internal and external stakeholders? Our panelists will tackle these issues head-on, sharing invaluable insights drawn from their own real-world experiences.

• Moderator

  

  Daisuke Inoue

  KIYO Learning Co.,Ltd.

  Executive Officer

  

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  Keisuke Ezoe

  Kao Corporation

  Team Leader, Social Media Management Team, Media Marketing Department, Marketing Innovation Center, Kao Corporation

  

• 

  Manami Kawazu

  YO-HO Brewing

  Brand Promotion Unit Director

  

• 

  Yoshitake Katayama

  DAIKIN INDUSTRIES, LTD.

  General Manager, Corporate Communications Department