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The global ad firm J. Walter Thompson recently conducted research into Americans’ attitudes toward commercial brands that take stances on political issues. In a cross-generational group of respondents, 88 percent agreed with the firm’s proposition that corporations have the power to influence social change; 78 percent of them agreed that companies “should take action to address the important issues facing society.” And Millennials were particularly pro-action. As Lucie Greene, the worldwide director of the Innovation Group at JWT, summed things up to me: “In these times, actually, it’s becoming more important for brands to take a point of view.” Not just because brands have the power to effect change, but because people want them—expect them—to use it.

It’s an insight on display in ads that conclude with entreaties to “open your heart to everyone”; it’s also on display in the spate of recent commercials that have functioned as overt (if also sometimes covert) political advocacy. During the 2017 Super Bowl, Airbnb aired a spot—and an accompanying hashtag—featuring a series of different faces flashing onscreen as a background to text that read: “No matter who you are … no matter where you’re from … who you love … or who you worship … we all belong. The world is more beautiful the more you accept.” That ad aired on TV around the same time as the Budweiser commercial that celebrates immigration. And the 84 Lumber ad that (maybe?) did the same. And the Audible ad that features Zachary Quinto reading a line from Nineteen Eighty-Four: “If he were allowed contact with foreigners … the sealed world in which he lives would be broken.”

The spots are subtle in their messaging; they operate with enough ambiguity to allow for a kind of plausible deniability. (“We all belong” is both stridently argumentative and, seen in another way, entirely meaningless.) But the ads are doing what JWT’s research suggested brands should do, to win converts: They’re taking a stand, and an expressly political one. It’s hard not to interpret the Amazon ad featuring the priest and the imam, wordless though it may be, the way The Daily Beast did: as “a total repudiation of Trumpism.” It’s hard not to read something similar into Samsung’s Super Bowl ad for its virtual-reality technology—the one that aired VR footage of Donald Trump’s inauguration followed immediately by footage of the women’s march on Washington. And the Expedia spot that follows a woman around the world, as she aids refugees? The company arranged the ad’s premiere, tellingly, to drop during CNN’s coverage of the new president’s inauguration.

This is a moment of pervasive political awareness in American life: Politics, and more specifically political conversation, are infusing pop culture, and high culture, and commercial culture. During a time that finds late-night variety show hosts doubling as advocacy journalists and sitcoms airing episodes that grapple explicitly with Donald Trump’s presidency, it’s perhaps unsurprising that self-consciously commercial messages would follow suit. JWT’s report hints at a broader truth: To be relevant in America, right now—whether you are an artist or a journalist or a copywriter at Wieden+ Kennedy—will often demand explicit engagement with American politics. In that sense, it makes sense that commercial messages are putting the “ad” in “advocacy.” Of course the CEO of a fast-casual bakery chain sees fit to declare, “If you share our values and share that philosophy, then yeah, come on in.” Of course a Starbucks ad, starring a Marine veteran who is now employed as a barista, culminates with the reminder not just to “Be good to each other,” but also to “Be 🇺🇸 to each other.”