Hyundai’s New Commercial

The European associates of Hyundai, the world’s fourth largest automobile manufacturer in the world, apparently believes that showing a man trying to kill himself in one of their vehicles is actually good for marketing. The ad is called Pipe Job, and was created by the ad agency Innocean Europe. It depicts a man taping a hose from a Hyundai ix35′s exhaust pipe into the cabin of the car, trying to commit suicide.
It then shows the man sitting in the cabin, waiting and waiting and waiting for death to claim him.

A few frames later, the garage lights come back on and the man opens the garage door. The tag line is; the New ix35 with 100% water emissions.”

I was appalled when I was unfortunate enough to see it by accident. I was toying with the idea of buying one of these cars but there is no way that I would do so now and I hope that I am not alone in this. Can you imagine how a person with a mental illness feels when he/she sees this? I thought that people world over were so aware of being politically correct nowadays. What happened to the owner and manager of Hyundai? What were they thinking when they allowed this? How could they possible be so insulting to people with mental illness, or other disabilities?

I am purposefully not including a link to the video that goes with their report as I find it far too shocking and the last thing I want to do is add insult to injury to any handicapped person who was unfortunate enough to see it. I only came across it by accident. I  can’t help wondering what Hyundai will come up with next. Seeing such a vivid descripion of a man ending his life, in order to seel cars, is not only in the poorest of taste, but thoughtless in the extreme. Is human life worth so little nowadays in the quest to make money?

For over a year I have been blogging about mental illness, Alzheimer’s disease and other brain illnesses and handicaps in order to try and get people to speak out which in turn will lessen the stigma associated with these heartbreaking illnesses. I was under the impression that the public’s understanding of mental illness was more wide-spread, and that there was a little less discrimination against people with mental illness. I have written about the way journalists depict suicides in the media and even this can up the suicide rate temporarily-which is known as suicide contagion. I wonder whether the agency who produced this commercial even knows about this aspect? And, if they had known, I do hope that they might have cared sufficiently not to run it.

I read today that Hyundai Motors America are shocked by the depiction of a suicide attempt in an inappropriate UK video depicting one of their cars.

I posted a blog this morning and had no intention of posting this one now but …  I hit the wrong button. Today’s blog was entitled ‘you have holes in your head, Jill’ … Oh,how right my friend was. Here I am, doing the same thing again – always in a hurry, never checking sufficiently. So, I doubt whether I will be posting another blog tomorrow morning. Please forgive me.