Uber and Facebook Apology Advertising

Recently, I couldn't help but notice a strange similarity between a couple of broadcast ads that seem to be in frequent rotation lately.

The first one I think I saw was for Uber, featuring their new CEO. The Uber ad, "Moving Forward", talks about how they are changing and fixing things (I think that the one on YoutTube that I've linked to is one of a series). Then, there's the Facebook commercial, "Facebook here together". 

Facebook's message, bundled with images of happy people, is along the lines of "recently, there was a bunch of scary news about how the Facebook platform was used to grab all of this knowledge about you, but we're changing, improving our privacy policies, so it's safe to go back on our platform.

Essentially, both of these are heavy rotation commercials for the apology tours that both companies have been making. But you have to wonder, what's the goal of these ads? If you deleted your Uber app, will seeing the CEO saying he's making things better give the service a try again? While Facebook has made some real ads, have they made really substantive changes to their platform? If you'd quit using the app, would this commercial make you go back?

And if this type of ad is not for the people who left, who is it for?

Is it for the shareholders? Do we think that an ad like this is going to move the share price of the stock?

I think it's more about trying to build the foundation for a PR messaging point. Essentially, we're not just on the apology tour, we're SPENDING MONEY to say we're sorry and move forward. This is an effort to help support some changes that are, in some ways, minor changes that don't really impact the core issues that took them into apology-land. In essence, these are an effort to inflate the "fixes" in an effort to minimize the original harm.

Anyway, no grand take-away from this one. As I watched these ads, I couldn't help but reflect on whether I could recall other companies doing similar apology ads. I was trying to imagine what an IBM apology ad might look like. The closest thing I could initially think of what Domino's did with this where they call out quality complaints and promote their attempts to change. I actually liked this campaign -- I feel like there's a broad perception that Domino's pizza quality isn't high -- but I haven't purchased a pizza from them since... probably college. 

Then I remembered this "we're sorry" ad from BP after the massive Deepwater Horizon spill. Oops, I accidentally linked this to the Southpark episode where they were parodying the BP ad. Yeah, I think that's an example of how this kind of ad really fails.