Buy GM, or the robot gets it

Posted by Maggie February 5th, 2007 at 09:51am In Adverts Great Feats of Strength

There were many things to like about last night's Super Bowl. Prince was phenomenal. The first quarter was a hilarious fumble-filled mud fight. The ad for the Harmon Garmon GPS system was genuinely amusing.

But if you watched the ads, no doubt you saw GM's latest offering.

In this ad, a robot at a GM plant drops a screw, loses his job, gets depressed, and KILLS HIMSELF, before realizing it was all a dream. Before there were robots making cars, people made cars. Basically, the message of the ad is "buy GM, or robots (PEOPLE) will DIE." 

In tone, at least at the beginning, it's reminiscent of this ad, perhaps the best commercial of all time.

But whereas the Ikea ad cynically embraces the buy-and-discard consumer culture, reminding us that technology is moving forward and we shouldn't be sentimental about all the crap we're accumulating, the GM ad encourages us to anthropomorphize the machines that are making our cars in order to guilt us into buying more. 

This ad haunted us for the remainder of the game.

The robot JUMPS OFF A BRIDGE.

And then the Bears lost. 

  1. Dan posted the following on February 5, 2007 at 10:08 am.

    I’m sad that the Bears lost. I mean, not that I watched the Superbowl, but if I did, I would have rooted for them. Go Chicago!

  2. Cristin posted the following on February 5, 2007 at 1:48 pm.

    I literally started crying when I saw this commercial. I have never been so upset by something on TV in my life. (Since I saw the parent trap a few weeks ago and started crying at the ending, again, anyway).

    I’m honestly thinking about sending a strongly worded email to GM about this.

  3. Lani posted the following on February 5, 2007 at 3:38 pm.

    The manufacturing geeks over at the Evolving Excellence blog (www.evolvingexcellence.com) are thrashing the GM commercial as well. Fundamentally they say the reason Toyota has such high quality is due to their respect for people, which creates employee continuous improvement suggestion programs, which robots can’t do. Instead of firing someone (or a robot) over a dropped screw, Toyota would get a team of people together to figure out what process failure led to the screw being dropped… not canning tens of years of experience for a mistake that probably wasn’t the person’s (robot’s) fault. It’s a good read:

    http://www.evolvingexcellence.com/blog/2007/02/gms_disrespect_.html

  4. sara posted the following on February 5, 2007 at 4:35 pm.

    I wonder what Stephen Colbert will have to say about the whole Bears issue.

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