In a commercial for Google’s smart-home subsidiary Nest, a teenage boy, dressed for prom night, prepares to board a limousine. Before he leaves, a paternal voice off camera gently commands the boy to treat his date with respect, reminding him that he is entitled to nothing. That voice, it’s soon revealed, belongs not to the girl’s father, but to the boy’s: It emanates from a curved, black audio device mounted in place of a doorbell as the father tele-parents from work via the Nest app. A text overlay appears, reading, “It starts at home.”

The ad, which occupied a coveted Academy Awards slot, is an obvious nod to the #MeToo movement—a concept surely familiar to the Oscar-viewing public in the wake of Hollywood’s recent sexual-assault reckoning. At first glance, there’s nothing remarkable about the commercial; it uses such standard marketing techniques as demographic targeting and imparts a general air of corporate goodwill. Yet beneath its putative message of male responsibility lies a more insidious phenomenon: The commodification of protest, particularly in the era of Trump.

This issue reached a fever pitch a year ago, when an infamous Pepsi commercial starring Kendall Jenner distilled the iconography of protests against police brutality into a collage of meaningless signs, dance moves, and amicable cops. Though it was an egregious example of corporate appropriation, the repercussions were mild and fleeting: Pepsi removed the ad, apologized, and moved on. Meanwhile, companies like Nest have continued to glom on to mainstream social movements, simply in more subtle forms.

Since, roughly, Trump’s inauguration, private enterprise has tapped into an American furor gone mainstream, leveraging marches into marketplaces. In 2017, New York magazine’s style vertical, The Cut, informed readers which scarves and leggings from Uniqlo, Amazon, and American Apparel they should tote at the Women’s March. Smaller companies, too, used it as an advertising platform: The CEO of cosmetics firm Glossier carried a sign to the same march proclaiming “We’re in it together” under the company’s signature “G,” and health-tech startup Tia offered free poster templates for download, its playful serif logo nestled in the corner. (The page appears to have been deactivated.) Cell carrier CREDO Mobile adopted the same tactic, branding intact, for last month’s March For Our Lives to protest gun violence.



If protesters are a market, it should come as no surprise that signs and posters designed for them aren’t just canvases for ads; they’re also for sale. Princeton Architectural Press, for instance, has published a series of ready-made signs:

Posters for Change, a collection of 50 removable posters running the gamut of causes of the #Resistance, from the abstract “Stay woke” to the more concrete, if nonspecific, “Fund the Arts.” The book exhorts prospective marchers to “Tear, Paste, Protest”—that is, after they fork over the requisite $25.