The next time you find yourself in moral anguish about whether to buy your mistress a new condo or give your laid-off factory workers their back pay, you can find guidance in the television advertisements of one of America's largest insurance companies. That's right, in this dark age of corporate recklessness, it is a US financial giant, Liberty Mutual, that brings us the Responsibility Project, a 'socially responsible' ad campaign masquerading as an online forum and short-film collection for the discussion of ethical dilemmas.
A 2006 television ad known as 'Liberty 'What Goes' Commercial' led to the current campaign. That ad depicted a chain reaction of good deeds of the I-will-go-three-inches-out-of-my-way-for-a-stranger-if-it-doesn't-cost-me-a-dollar variety, including letting another car merge into traffic, holding an elevator door for a straggler and picking up a doll that has fallen out of a baby carriage. Returning dolls to babies is in fact such an archetypal good deed that it is repeated no less than three times during the 60-second commercial.
That commercial blossomed into Liberty's current campaign, featuring the Marlowes, a white middle-class family facing the everyday dilemmas of the global financial meltdown. Dad's company is cutting jobs and he wants to cap family spending; mum doesn't know whether to send grandpa, who has Alzheimer's, to the nursing home. The ads all end with the tagline: 'Doing the right thing says a lot about a person. And a company.'
Online, the ads are complemented by a series of Responsibility Project short films and a blog, which includes discussions about whether pet cloning is wrong, or whether a US bakery chain has erred by refusing to inscribe a birthday cake to three-year-old Adolf Hitler Campbell.
The films are unfortunate: moral tales by 'award-winning' insiders of the US media-advertising complex. Grant Heslov, a director-producer who has worked with George Clooney on several occasions, filmed an all-out manhunt for the lost teddy bear of a boy with cancer.
As if it isn't bad enough that Hollywood magnates such as DreamWorks' Jeffrey Katzenberg, who makes millions licensing cheap plastic toys, are trying to tune our collective moral compass through brain-numbers such as Shrek. Now television ads by huge financial companies are doing it too?