GM’s Quality Control Superbowl Ad

Hi All! I was watching the Super Bowl, for the commercials as always, and couldn’t help but feel a little weird about the GM Quality Control spot. Please take a look if you haven’t seen it yet.

After it played, my wife and I (with mouths gapping open in shock) turned and looked at each other. She then made a point that stuck with me. “GM is laying off thousands of workers and their Super Bowl commercial is a worker who gets let go and commits suicide?”

I’ve looked at a lot of responses from it’s posting on YouTube. In GM’s defense it boils down to this: it’s a dream sequence in a commercial about a robot arm with feelings. In that light, why take is so seriously?

Well, GM is not doing so well financially and is in the process of cutting 30,000 jobs and closing 9 assembly plants in North America. Although this is putting a lot of people out of work, it helps insure 143,000 jobs that could have been lost if they closed their North American doors completely.

They are already in a very difficult position so why would they run such an ad? What does this say about their feelings toward workers who have been let go? What about to the employees that are left? Whether they like it or not, this ad speaks of the company. It’s not “just a commercial” if they spent 2 million dollars on the air time and who knows how much to produce it.

Who knows why in the world they thought this was a good idea. For myself, the ad is extremely well done and draws you into the story in the first moments. However the payoff at the end is insensitive and horrific.