In The Wake Of Broken Trust

“I am affected, not because you have deceived me but because I can no longer believe in you.” 

—Friedrich Nietzsche

This past June, while watching the U.S. Open golf tournament on television, I was inundated with the apology advertising of both Wells Fargo and Facebook. The ads appeared so often that I began to wonder if CBS had run a mea culpa, bulk-ad special for the event.

I was simultaneously fascinated and repulsed by the ads.

How fascinating that two of our larger corporations settled on propitiation strategies and a supposed show of “transparency” (I guess my personal skepticism is leaking out with the quote marks) to the customer bases they had exploited. Facebook has repeatedly and consistently violated its customers’ privacy. The company’s ad sought to admit as much—but it quickly moved to touching photos of friends and dads with their babies, etc. The irony of this advertising effort is that the Federal Trade Commission brought these allegations of deception about users’ privacy to Facebook a few years ago, and in a settlement with the commission in 2012, the company essentially promised to do better. It didn’t. Now Facebook’s ad is trying to tell us that this time the company is sincere.

Wells Fargo, meanwhile, in addition to imposing egregious fee and penalty practices in its mortgage and car loan divisions, was also opening deposit accounts and transferring funds without customer authorization, as well as applying for credit card accounts in customers’ names without their knowledge or consent. Customers were hit with annual fees, in addition to finance and interest charges and late fees. The company also created PINs for customers without their consent, and created phony e-mail addresses to enroll consumers in online banking services.

Fade To Black

The Wells Fargo ad starts by reminding us how crucial a role the company has played in our nation’s history, invoking the California Gold Rush and showing a kid at a Depression-era bank counter. In the company’s appeal to unquestionable trust, we hear the words acknowledging the recent scandals: “We always found a way until we lost it.” After fading to black, the commercial resumes: “But that isn’t where the story ends.” The ad goes on to tell us about the company’s “complete recommitment to you.”

This is the part I had real problems with. The neighborly cadence, the slick language and visceral images make the efforts at repositioning all the more suspect. We’re somehow going to repair all the greed-induced scars with a trite confessional advert delivered in a flippant tone. Hmmm. We are a forgiving culture, aren’t we?