It is destined to be one of those moments in television history that will haunt us for the rest of our lives. Where were you when Peloton conjured up and released the unshackled commercially corrupted Spirit of Christmas in all its perfectly sculpted duplicitous glory? Never before has an attempt to exploit the emotionally conflicted powder keg that is the Yule season gone so spectacularly wrong.
We can never un-see what we saw: the face of that young woman being gifted by her lover on Christmas morning with a Peloton exercise bike. It was all captured in her tortured expression: The gratitude of being given the key to sustaining and extending her love relationship into the New Year. The anxiety of receiving the unsubtle message that her body is presently sub-par for maintaining her lover’s interest. The fear and hope in her resolve to submit to the physical punishment necessary to appease her desperate need to continue being loved by her man.
This gobsmacking misfire cooked up by Peloton’s advertising elves, universally reviled as “offensive, dystopian and sexist,” has reportedly resulted in a loss of $1.5 Billion in market value for the would-be “Netflix of Fitness.” The stomach-churning ad, which concludes with the woman’s grateful thank you to her lover as she shows him vlog clips of her year-long quest for acceptable hotness, has been likened on the Internet to the Orwellian British anthology series “Black Mirror,” as well as “The Handmaid’s Tale” on Hulu.
Our annual year’s-end hopes for reaffirmation and revitalization of the love sustaining our relationships with our family, friends and romantic partners, as well as our spiritual convictions, Christian or other, is epitomized in the joy of Christmas. The flipside is all the attendant anxiety in the fear of losing that love, the most precious essence of our humanity. And so it is that every year the Masters of Marketing deploy their magical algorithms for pushing all the buttons of our frazzled psyches in hopes of harvesting the bounty of our year’s labors from our bank accounts. This season, Peloton pushed the envelope one spinning session too far, and felt the burn, big time.