How Well Can You Distinguish Between Facebook's, Uber's and Wells Fargo's Apology Ads?
If you've been watching the NBA Conference Finals, you might be under the impression that American business is suffering from a crisis of confidence. Virtually every time a quarter ends or a coach calls a time-out, TNT or ESPN cuts to a commercial in which a corporate giant apologizes to the American public for doing… something.
Facebook, Uber and Wells Fargo have all been running ads against the NBA playoffs in attempts to shake off recent scandals and make a fresh start with consumers. The three companies no doubt spent lots and lots of money customizing their messages, but taken together their ads seem like a mishmash of clichés about the importance of trust, accountability and a commitment to you.
It's worth revisiting the incidents that made each of these companies so reviled in the first place. Facebook has come under fire for enabling the circulation of fake news stories, letting Russian trolls create fake pages exploiting divisions in American politics, and allowing unscrupulous companies to download ungodly amounts of personal data from unsuspecting Facebook users. Uber has faced controversies involving subminimum wages for drivers, its systemic evasion of local laws and regulations, sexual harassment at its headquarters and the boorish behavior of its former CEO, Travis Kalanick, among other things. Wells Fargo has been fined $185 million for incentivizing its employees to open accounts for consumers without their consent or knowledge, plus $1 billion for forcing customers to buy car insurance they didn't need and pay unfair fees on their mortgages.
You wouldn't know any of this from their respective apology ads. Facebook's ad rushes through the problems of "spam, clickbait, fake news and data misuse," without explaining either why the company allowed these scourges to flourish or what it's doing to crack down on them going forward. Uber's ad doesn't actually mention a single controversy, either directly or indirectly — it merely announces that it's "listening" to its customers and drivers now. Wells Fargo, to its credit, explicitly says that it is "ending product sales goals for branch bankers." But unless you've been following the company's crises in the news, you probably don't get what's the big deal about product sales goals in the first place — and Wells Fargo doesn't seem to want to connect the dots for you.
To be honest, if these campaigns weren't all running at the same time, during the same basketball game, I might not find them so frustrating. But seeing all three together, sometimes in the space of a few minutes at halftime, emphasizes how much they have in common — namely, feel-good music, a lot of vague buzzwords and a lack of specifics. The fact that Facebook and Uber were both in the news recently for user surveillance and assault, respectively, doesn't exactly discourage my impression that these apology ads are more about marketing than morality.
After being bombarded with Facebook, Uber and Wells Fargo apology ads for two weeks of NBA conference finals, I simultaneously feel like I've memorized them and that they're all bleeding together in my head. How about you? Can you distinguish among these ubiquitous ads? I put together a little quiz to see how well you can remember the highlights and lowlights of these three campaigns.
If you haven't seen the ads yet, you can watch Facebook's here, Uber's here and Wells Fargo's here. But if you watch the ads right before taking the quiz, you may as well release an apology ad of your own, because that's cheating.
