General Motors Robot is a Loser
General Motors aired a commercial during this year's Super Bowl that made me feel uncomfortable. For those of you who missed it, the ad featured an assembly line robot who accidentally drops a bolt and is subsequently laid off. In the next scenes the robot tries unsuccessfully to find a new job and slips into depression. The last scene shows the robot committing suicide and then waking up from this bad dream.
The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention protested the ad and I noticed their case began to be picked up in this morning's news. So I jumped over to www.gm.com and sure enough they were featuring the laid off robot ad on their home page. They had 30 and 60 second versions of it. I took this screen capture at about 10:00am PST which shows the ad featured on GM's home page. Then, just a few minutes later GM removed all traces of the ad from their web site!
Around about this same time I got this email from a "friend" and she...err, I mean "they" really summed up my feelings about the insensitive ad campaign.
"Okay now here's my rant: That GM ad made me highly uncomfortable. That's why I made you rewind and watch it. It was wrong on many levels. 1). Blatantly showing off and being proud that robots replaced the people and now the robots are even getting laid off. That if you got laid off from GM you should kill yourself. 3). That if you are a laid off GM person/robot you should be reduced to holding the signs on the side of the road about a sale, or simply holding things at a Taco Bell. I always feel like the people who stand on the side of the road waving a car sale sign in a gorilla suit in arizona summer is completely inhumane and demeaning work that should be outlawed. Okay, I need to take a breather now. It's the humanitarian/liberal in me."
My feelings exactly. Suicide is not the only offensive aspect of this GM commercial. The ad demonstrates a lack of respect and compassion for the 30,000+ employees GM has recently laid off. That is a lot of firings for a company to try to make light of. I wonder if General Motors thinks their former employees suck? They appear to be suggesting that if you cannot make it at GM then you have no skills and are completely untrainable...might as well go jump off a bridge because you are losers and nobody likes you. Funny stuff.
