Am I The Only One Upset By These?

It is bad enough when television shows got to be so morally ambivalent over the years, with characters that break the law, regardless of what side they are on, but now all of this seems to have broken the barrier into commercials as well.

Toyota’s newest ads suggest that drivers eager to buy a new Toyota should dump their old car by pushing it off the roof of a parking garage, dropping a steel beam on it, or chopping down a tree so it falls on the vehicle. In one ad, a family works together to roll a boulder off a cliff onto their car.

The Insurance Fraud Bureau and the Coalition Against Insurance Fraud, in Washington, say the unspoken message is that an insurance settlement from the old car will pay for the new Toyota. Letters have been sent to Toyota urging the company to pull the ads. The watchdog group believes fraud bureaus in other states and some insurers also plan to write Toyota. Toyota has issued no response.

No one believes commercials alone will entice car owners into criminal behavior, but there is research that suggests that toleration of unethical behavior can influence people to act unethically. Commercials can add to that negative environment, far more than some television shows, where people ‘expect’ the actors to be law breakers or morally ambivilant, regardless of it they are the ‘heroes’ or not.

After all, the only conceivable purpose for destroying your existing car, rather than trading it in, would be to collect insurance money to pay for a new one. And every scene in the Toyota ads is a crime.

But what do you do when an insurance company’s ad tells you to break the law? A Mercury Insurance commercial on television has the motto: ‘œAll insurance companies talk about low rates. At Mercury, it’s a way of life.’ And they illustrate that so well, at the airport, when the Mercury middle manager is off the plane, picking up his ‘˜luggage’ which happens to be filled with his co-workers. See, breaking the law and risking your employee’s lives always should take a back seat to saving money, right? What were they thinking when they wrote that one?

Sure, all of this is just the sign of the times, where lawbreaking and tolerance for personal crime can always be justified by saving a buck. If these ‘˜little’ things are good indicators of our society, we as a people are in a lot more trouble than we realize. This is my own opinon, of course. Your mileage may vary.

Regards,
Roger Born
“Sorry, no refunds”