To Whom It May Concern:
Although I watch very little television, I have realized that it is impossible to do so for any amount of time without encountering an ad for Bowflex. In the past your ads were simply annoying for a brief amount of time, quickly forgotten until 7 minutes later, when it would run again. But last night I saw your new ad, which features two men back from Afghanistan, proclaiming how the Bowflex kept them in shape while at war.
Are you so removed from any sort of human decency that you don’t realize that using the specter of the war in Afghanistan to sell an exercise machine is a repugnant and callous exercise in tastelessness? People died in Afghanistan. Innocent people, whose only “crime” was living in the wrong place at the wrong time. That the death of these people is trumpeted and celebrated at all is morally indefensible, but using it as fodder for your attempts at greater market share is loathsome.
While I doubt much discussion occurred among your board of directors prior to the running of this commercial, and I also doubt that this letter, or any others of its ilk that you might receive, will do anything but prove the effectiveness of your ad campaign, I do hope that at some point your company will reconsider the tactic of attempting to profit from the misery of others. War is perhaps at some point a necessary evil of our world. It is never a cause for celebration, no matter the outcome or the causes for which it was fought. But to use it as a marketing tool is an insult to those who died, and to all people with a shred of decency-decency you most obviously don’t share.
I have never contemplated purchasing one of products in the past, and certainly will never do so in the future. I will, however, attempt to enlighten as many people as I possibly can that the Nautilus Group, with its Bowflex product, is striving to profit from terrorism and human misery in the lowest, most contemptible fashion imaginable.Companies are not living entities, and cannot be expected to display human characteristics. But the directors of the Nautilus Group-Brian R. Cook, Kevin T. Lamar, Randall Potter and Rod W. Rice are human. Humans that hopefully can understand the error of their decision in this matter and reverse it. Because for now, these men, along with their Board of Directors, are humans without a soul. I can only hope that if you don’t understand the gross disrespect you show for your fellow man, that your fellow man will show you the same, and ignore your hateful, insensitive ad and the product it touts.
In closing, I ask that you reconsider this ad campaign. I hope that you will remember the lives ended and families ruined by our actions in Afghanistan. They did not die for you to sell exercise machines and increase your bottom line. The Nautilus Group and its Bowflex product have been in the past at best an annoyance; now they are an obscenity.
Letter to Bowflex, 2002
