Toyota recall ad: evil genius, or just me?

One could have expected the mea culpa ad from Toyota to be a well-crafted piece. Like the company's response to the quality concerns motivating the recalls, it might have been slow in coming, but the rollout shows poise and competence. In communications like these the implications and subliminal signals mean as much as what's stated. That's what got me thinking that one of these signals is amazingly cynical. Here's the ad:



Already the news shows are replaying (and thus conditioning us with) the lines, starting at approximately 0:13 in this YouTube stream, "In recent days, our company hasn't been living up to the standards you've come to expect from us, or we expect from ourselves." This is pitch and tone broadcast at a master level.

Then, "That's why 172,000 Toyota and dealership and employees are dedicated to making things right." The production lines will stop, the fixes to affected cars made . . . and so on. We'll earn back your trust! Very earnest.

BUT. Note the imagery when the narrator is delivering these lines. It's factory workers. The ad is signaling to us (or maybe just me) that the assembly workers are the face of the problem and by extension the source of the buying public's disappointment. Not the design engineers, not the procurement people who sourced manufacture of Toyota parts to the fringes of the global supply web, and especially not the executives who heretofore have been under scrutiny for sitting on the quality problems long after they were made aware of them. We don't even see a suit and tie in the ad.

In the first act of this morality play of commerce and hubris – about a week before the TV ad began its run – Jim Lentz, head of Toyota Motor Sales USA, ventured out to take the spears, notably going on the Today show and taking questions via YouTube. And in the days before the ad debuted, Toyota Motor Corp President Akio Toyoda, grandson of the company's founder, went before the cameras to take personal, public responsibility in the Japanese manner. But these are one day's NPR moment, the messages that senior executives in government need to hear from their private-sector peers during this kind of high-magnitude  shitstorm. The ad is the thing playing into living rooms at peak viewing times and ultimately positioning the public reaction.

Is it just me, or is this one of those dastardly Abu Ghraib plays where confoundment from on high quickly gives way to fixing blame on underlings? Yet more cynical: in this case, the line workers we see in the commercial had nothing whatever to do with the problems being acknowledged by Toyota in its ad. It could be argued that the ad's strategy is simply to humanize the company and remind us that Toyota is composed of our friends and countrymen. But that's still my point. The story occasioning the ad is one of poor executive decisions by "The Company," of corporate action and inaction, of bean-counting and, for a while there, attempted avoidance. Not of line workers screwing up. So why do these brown-baggers have to get spun into the works?

I'm hoping it was RLM, Toyota's overachieving stateside PR firm, that thought up this device to mitigate scrutiny of their clients in the executive suite. As opposed to someone inside Toyota's leadership. And as opposed to the alternative that the signal I received is not the one being sent.

Maybe it's me. Could I be calculating enough to read more into the situation than the kings of crisis management? It should be noted I'm no ideological foe of globalism and all that. Rather, I'm a fan of the communications profession. So much so that I must acknowledge evil genius (or maybe it's just me) for the genius it is.