The real story behind the Peloton ad fail
It’s bad storytelling, not bad acting, that killed the Peloton Christmas ad
It’s hard to know what was going through the mind of high-end, white person home exercise equipment company Peloton in late November when it launched its Christmas ad, The Gift That Gives Back. But one or two things are heavily surmised.
First, the Peloton advertising team was likely far gone on PCP-laced Thanksgiving turkey for their final landmark creative session in which all the normal video ideas they’d come up with to date were trashed in favor of an exercise bike-themed homage to The Blair Witch Project.
Second, the script writer at Peloton is at this very moment looking for a new job writing press releases for Richard “21 Jump Street” Grieco from the LA county lock-up.
What we actually know about the Peloton ad and its aftermath is that Peloton stands by its work, and that nearly everyone but Peloton is revolted by it.
Or, as Comedy Central’s Jess Dwek tweeted: “The only way to enjoy that Peloton ad is to think of it as the first minute of an episode of Black Mirror.”
No counter-argument here. The ad is difficult to watch from any angle you pick: gender equality, tech dystopia (Peloton bikes come equipped with a “sweatproof” 22-inch HD touchscreen for live streamed exercise classes and “real-time instructor shoutouts”), unhinged first-world holiday consumerism, etc.
In our brave new globally-warmed world where women are finally taking pick axes to the male gaze and, as a species, we’re surrendering our privacy and brains upgrade by upgrade to a near-pervasive, round-the-clock digital experience, the ad distills so much of what we’re angry or scared about into thirty effortlessly hateable seconds.
But The Gift That Gives Back doesn’t fail simply because it’s tone-deaf. The story behind the Peloton ad debacle is actually less complicated than that: it’s just poorly thought-out storytelling.
And the holes in the Peloton story aren’t as subjective as the creepiness of its narrative, even if the two are tragically intertwined. You can actually pinpoint the problems with the story, which, as we’ve promised in our title, we will gladly do for you.
Character
When you’re writing a story you want audiences to relate to, you need to start with a character they can relate to. There’s been a lot of talk about Grace from Boston, aka the “Peloton Wife”, mostly about her precarious mental state and wildly beseeching eyes.
How do you feel about stationary exercise bikes? Excited? Annoyed? Don’t give a damn? The Peloton Wife feels an all-encompassing existential dread. There isn’t one second of the thirty-second video where the poor woman isn’t agitated, pained, miserable or ambivalent, while the Peloton bike itself lurks in the background throughout like the demonic lovechild of fitness guru Jack LaLanne and Damien from The Omen.
Can relatable characters be agitated and ambivalent? Sure. Most stand-up comedians make careers out of it.
But this isn’t Sarah Silverman on a Peloton. This is a woman who has five to ten seconds to get us to start liking a $2,245 stationary bike so much that we could see it in our own homes.
This doesn’t happen in The Gift That Gives Back. The Peloton Wife, through no fault of her own, doesn’t put us in a Christmassy mood or inspire us to make serious life changes. She cries out for help.
Wouldn’t you help her if you could? A young wife whose smirking husband’s best idea for a Christmas gift is an exercise bike she doesn’t want to ride but rides anyway, like a gerbil on a treadmill, for a year?
Why does she do this?
There’s been a lot of speculation about this too.
Motivation
Once they have their characters, most writers give them a problem to get out of. These are the basic building blocks of a story. But in order for those problems to really engage audiences, characters need to have a stake in solving them.
For example, we wouldn’t care so much about Keanu Reeves’ character stopping the bus in Speed, if he wasn’t also challenged to save a busload of hostages. The problem (how do I stop this brakeless bus) is intensified by that stake (all those people who will die if I don’t figure this out fast). Reeves has a clear motivation that we can relate to.
What is the Peloton Wife’s motivation?
The truth is, we never really know what’s at stake for the Peloton Wife.
Weight loss? Probably not. As others have pointed out, she’s rail thin.
Recovery from an illness or injury? If yes, knowing this would have made for a better story. She would have been hugely relatable.
A childhood fear of exercise bikes? It’s possible. The Peloton Wife was eight when she hopped on her father’s one-speed Vitamaster. Everything was just fine until the front wheel detached from the machine and she sped off through the drywall like a crazed unicyclist. She hadn’t considered mounting a stationary bike ever again. Until Peloton. Peloton changed everything for her. Thank you, Peloton!
Would this story have sold more Pelotons? Probably not. But at least it’s a story, which is more than we can say for The Gift That Gives Back, which apparently cost Peloton $1.5 billion in lost market value in the weeks following its release. Even the Peloton Wife guzzling Aviation Gin packs a bigger punch.
Tension
Without motivation or a stake, there’s no tension. Without tension, a story has no momentum, builds no expectations and delivers no pay-off.
Forget the Peloton Wife for a moment and imagine you’re watching footage of a woman waking up at the crack of dawn to run a marathon every day without fail. You know nothing else about this woman. All you see are her unwavering dedication and her routine.
Now imagine you know she’s training to make the US Olympic track team — with one leg. (When she was seven, she lost the other one in a climbing accident.) Imagine that she almost made the cut in Rio in 2018, despite this set-back, and that at age 33 this is her last real shot, and that the tryouts are in three days and she still has to shave one minute off her best time.
Her success and failure now mean everything to you.
Cut back to the Peloton Wife. If we knew why she was pedaling her exercise bike like a deranged hamster every day for a year, we might care a little more about her story, her bike and the company that produces it.
Does her story have to be serious or transformative? No, but it has to make an impact, and it has to get us to care about the Peloton brand. Peloton made the mistake of assuming that a nervous woman and a super expensive exercise bike equalled a transformative experience we could all relate to.
What they got was the exact opposite.
They hit our collective funny bone and all together we realized how smug and sad it would be to actually believe in a story like that.
