Let’s be honest. This is about a commercial. All 300-whatever words of this article are meant to have you watch a new commercial for a gin company, tangentially related to film because the parent company is owned by actor Ryan Reynolds. But this is also one of the most incredible stories of social media self-inflicted wounds you’ll read this year, as well as an example of digital trend-jacking done well. We spend so much time as consumers of entertainment media just watching companies go through the motions – release a poster, release a teaser, yadda yadda yadda – that it is genuinely thrilling to see a company screw things up to that degree.
What does a celebrity-backed gin company have to do with an exercise bike startup, you ask? Over the Thanksgiving weekend, Peloton premiered a new commercial for the holidays where Boston resident Grace (Monica Ruiz) receives a Peloton bike from her husband as a Christmas gift, seemingly against her will. The tone-deaf nature of the commercial inspired an immediate outroar on social media, which then inspired Aviation American Gin founder and sometime actor Ryan Reynolds to shoot their own commercial with Ruiz. Here’s the original video spot, in case you somehow missed it:
This is the kind of whiplash-inducing social media savvy that probably deserves its own Harvard Business Review study. The actor who placed Mr. Grace-In-Boston is openly worried this commercial might have killed his acting career; Peloton’s stock prices have dropped more than $1.5 billion (!) in three days; and a digital-friendly distillery has leaned into its agility – agility it gained from all that time spent on a Peloton bike, am I right? – that has allowed it to dominate social media for an entire day at minimal costs, even for sites like ours.
Still, despite all the controversy, it’s important to keep the human factor in mind. Somewhere in the world, a husband was genuinely prepared to surprise his wife with an exercise bike for the holidays. Maybe it was even his wife who informed him of the Peloton blowback, joking with him that the commercial was done in poor taste. And now, that husband has to scramble to change his gift and take the knowledge of what he almost did to his grave.