That Peloton ad with the husband gifting the bike felt like a horror movie

I tried to watch that 2019 Peloton holiday commercial everyone hated, and I honestly thought it was a parody at first. The wife made these 30-second videos documenting her year of riding and the husband just sat there watching them. The backlash was so fast that Peloton's stock dropped over $100 million in value within days, and their CEO had to come out and explain it was supposed to be motivational. Has any other brand recovered from a single ad going that badly?

2 comments

2 Comments

max4157d ago

Oh man, "dead quiet for weeks" - I can totally picture that. My buddy actually worked at their Brooklyn studio back then and said the same thing. Nobody wanted to make eye contact in the meetings after that ad dropped. I remember watching the backlash unfold on Twitter and thinking "this has to be a joke" but nope, real ad, real disaster. @simonh74 it's wild how one bad creative decision can tank a company's value like that. I had a coworker who owned Peloton stock and he was literally refreshing the price every five minutes that week, just watching it bleed. The weird part is the product itself was fine, but the ad made the whole brand feel creepy and out of touch. I don't think I've seen another company recover from that level of public roasting so quickly, they basically had to pretend the ad never existed.

simonh748d ago

Wait, did this actually drop their stock that much? A friend of mine bought one of those bikes used from a guy who worked at Peloton during that whole mess. He said the office was dead quiet for weeks after the ad aired, everyone just staring at their screens watching the stock ticker. People were calling in to cancel their subscriptions because they thought the company was out of touch. The weird thing is my friend says the bike itself is fine, he still uses it every morning, but he refuses to tell anyone where he got it.