![]() Our diverse community brings together people from over 190 countries the campaign is a celebration of that.” “Each piece of creative depicts real Fiverr community members who volunteered to participate in the campaign. “Our ‘Connections’ campaign was built to shed light on the innovative and authentic connections established on our platform. “Fiverr was founded on the concept of global collaboration,” reads the statement. Responding to the most recent debate around its ads, Fiverr released a statement highlighting the fact that the campaign features actual users of the site, and a “breadth of stories and inclusion represented in each individual piece of creative.” Replied a third, “By ‘marketing,’ do you mean business model?” “Feels like their marketing has always been pretty shamelessly exploitative,” wrote another response to Wong’s tweet. Some feel the company’s approach perpetuates a hamster-wheel reality of working multiple jobs without a livable wage or benefits. The most recent controversy highlights a deeper dissatisfaction that often arises with Fiverr and other sites that fuel the gig economy. But the formula quickly becomes problematic when ads show men benefitting from the affordable rates and midnight-oil hours of female freelancers. Other ads in the same campaign feature a diverse cast of characters, including women-and at least one woman of color-in positions of power. “They had this vetted by both white dudes and other, whiter dudes.” ![]() “I don’t understand how this could have happened,” reads one popular and scathingly sarcastic response to Wong’s post. That sparked a fresh round of online debate about the company, its messaging, and its very business model. “Are you a man who has built their career on taking credit for the work of younger women of color who get paid less than you? Now there’s an app for that!” wrote Julia Carrie Wong, senior technology reporter at The Guardian, in a Twitter quip that earned more that 5,000 retweets and 20,000 likes.Īre you a man who has built their career on taking credit for the work of younger women of color who get paid less than you? Now there’s an app for that! /DziGXqPj8l The intended message: He has a job that needs doing. The right side features a young black woman gazing in the opposite direction, similarly satisfied. “Your project is due ASAP,” reads the copy. The left side of a billboard features a middle-aged man gazing upwards with a slight smile on his face. Never mentioned or even implied is the shamefulness of a job that doesn’t permit a worker to afford his own commute.Fiverr just can’t seem to get its marketing right-try as it might.ĭespite hiring a new agency, Mekanism, and this year launching a new campaign following backlash over its portrayal of freelancers as gleefully overworked, the online marketplace for the gig economy has again drawn ire for some of its latest outdoor ads. The story is always written as a tearjerker, with praise for the person’s uncomplaining attitude a car is usually donated to the subject in the end. I’ve come to detest the local-news set piece about the man who walks ten or eleven or twelve miles to work-a story that’s been filed from Oxford, Alabama from Detroit, Michigan from Plano, Texas. Human-interest stories about the beauty of some person standing up to the punishments of late capitalism are regular features in the news, too. The contrast between the gig economy’s rhetoric (everyone is always connecting, having fun, and killing it!) and the conditions that allow it to exist (a lack of dependable employment that pays a living wage) makes this kink in our thinking especially clear. “At the root of this is the American obsession with self-reliance, which makes it more acceptable to applaud an individual for working himself to death than to argue that an individual working himself to death is evidence of a flawed economic system. In this piece for The New Yorker, Jia Tolentino discusses how the gig economy driven by apps such as Uber and Lyft leads employees to overwork themselves at the expense of their health and safety.
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