Luxury stationary bike company Peloton must have gotten really freaking spooked by the backlash it received from professional agitators and perpetually offended amateurs for its holiday 2019 “Grace from Boston” TV commercial, which was wrongly and unfairly maligned as “sexist,” “mysogynistic,” and “a [white] male fantasy.”
Because about 15 minutes after the dust settled, Peloton’s advertising changed dramatically. Gone were the attractive and reasonably diverse casts, replaced by platoons of people so conspicuously hand-picked for their diverse shapes, sizes, colors, and sexual identities that every one of its ads now looks like the cantina scene from Star Wars. (Or an ad for Virgin Atlantic.)
Case in point: Peloton’s latest ad, titled “Work Out Your Way” — produced, unsurprisingly, in partnership with the aptly named Stink Films, the outfit that recently worked with Apple to crap out its hilariously cringey “Mother Nature” ad.
Below: Peloton’s new “Work Out Your Way” ad looks almost as obnoxious as it sounds.
Don’t bother looking for any straight white males here, Cranky readers. In Peloton ads, they’re as rare as rocking-horse shit.
(And make no mistake: this is a feature, not a bug.)
It’s a shame. In the aftermath of the “Grace from Boston” backlash, I had been proud of Peloton for standing its ground. Alas, the combined weight of so many progressive social media voices and corporate media outlets excoriating the company for the unforgivable sin of advertising a luxury item to its core audience of affluent consumers was apparently too much for the company to bear.
Because now, Peloton is for everyone. (Well, everyone except straight white males.) One of its ads from earlier this year is literally titled, “Peloton. Anyone. Anywhere.”
And, SHAZAM! Just like that, the stigma of wealth, privilege, and high-end consumerism (i.e., “the Peloton lifestyle”) was banished from the land.
Don’t you just love the smell of social justice in the morning?
But wait! Hold up, my Cranky friends. On second thought, maybe I am wrong.
Maybe it wasn’t the outrageous inequity of wealthy Americans being able to pay exorbitant sums of money in the name of health that caused this seismic shift in Peloton’s advertising.
Maybe, just maybe, it was the lure of those sweet, sweet ESG (environmental, social, and governance) scores, and the big bucks that they bring in.
You know those scores — the ones handed out by the plethora of ESG ratings agencies and pushed by the country’s top corporate investment firms (see: Larry Fink and BlackRock).
The ones that reward companies and their executive teams with huge piles of cash and bonuses for promoting certain (left-wing) agendas.
The ones that influence who gets re-elected or re-appointed to corporate boards of directors.
Yeah. Those ESG scores.
My goodness, I think I’m really onto something.
What makes me so sure, you ask?
Well, as if simply watching this pestiferous piece of advertising cowplop was not enough, I looked at the Peloton website and saw on its investor site an entire page dedicated to ESG.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is how I know what drove the change in Peloton’s advertising. And it is also what is driving so many other brands to create ads and television commercials that look and sound exactly like this one.
Sorry, Peloton, but personally, I will pass. This ad may not be offensive to you, but it is definitely not for me.
Cranky Ad Review rating: No stars, but five loud, proud, and absolutely fabulous ESG points out of five.
November 17 update:
Want to know just how w0ke today’s Peloton really is? Check out freedom-loving comedian JP Sears’ reaction to a conversation between Theo Von and UFC president Dana White in which they discuss how Peloton forced Von’s podcast to take down an episode in which he interviewed Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:
Related reading: This is why companies are pushing LGBTQ+
See all Cranky ad reviews | Subscribe | Go to blog home page
I stopped watching television as the pharmaceutical ads, the Friday plans off brand viagra ads and the bent carrot ad where the couple is in the kitchen with the stack of carrots were simply so insulting and nauseating and the medicare ads …god help me I want to call all those advertisers and tell the to eat plastic fruit! lol! but it is becoming a soul sucking experience. also all I could do was get about 2 mins of my movie at a time and 30 minutes of shitty commercial interruptions. what a waste of time. I have started to spend more time not watching anything and reading books and hanging with good friends
Good for you, Anonymous. I agree, and I too find myself watching less boob-tube in a desperate attempt to avoid the ads.
As always, I really enjoyed your post. Completely agree with you Cranky.
Thank you, Holiday. Great to hear from you!
We heard a little child was horribly killed by one of these Peloton machines, and if it is true, this product needs to be permanently removed from public sales and taken off the market!
Yes, in January, Peloton agreed to pay a $19 million fine to resolve a charge by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission that the company failed to immediately report a defect in one of its treadmills that led to more than a dozen injuries and a child’s death.
$19 million sounds like a small price to pay for such malfeasance.
One of the big reasons I now embrace streaming TV which blocks out commercials. And another reason, on the opposite end of the political spectrum I guess, is that I can watch Newsmax without having to be invaded every 15 minutes by the annoying fuck, the My Pillow Guy. What a two faced irritant, fake he is.
Here’s some irony, Robert: I was subjected to this Peloton ad entirely too many times while watching a premium streaming (not live-TV) service. The ads were out of control. This has been happening more and more.
Hmmmm, I have noticed that with some services. I watch Newsmax using Roku, and it puts up the Newsmax logo and plays some supposed music during the commercial breaks. And that really makes you take notice of how many breaks there are and how long they are!!
I record shows, then fwd through ads.
Understandable. What makes me cranky is the advertising industry knows that you do this, and they know why. But yet, they won’t do a thing to make TV commercials more tolerable. They deserve all of the flak they get.