Mass Mutual Chinese Restaurant Ad

An insurance company called Mass Mutual has been running a kinda stupid ad for a long, long time that has a group of businesspeople at a Chinese restaurant trying to order lunch, but the menu is only in Chinese. (This is a tactic of the Chinese military to confuse us all prior to an invasion, by the way.) They ask if there’s a menu in English, but the waitress says no. So a woman, one of their group, says something in Chinese to the waitress, and then says to the group: “You like dumplings, right?” And everyone agrees and is totally happy having dumplings for lunch. And so that’s a great ad for an insurance company, right? Not really, I’d say.

What if you didn’t want dumplings, but you felt like you had to agree because everyone else was hungry? Were you peer-pressured into accepting dumplings because you didn’t want to be rude? What if you’re allergic to shellfish or you require a gluten-free diet or you’ll go into anaphylactic shock? Can you really rely on some woman with a rudimentary understanding of Chinese to order for you, or do you really need to be able to decide for yourself what you should have to eat? Isn’t insurance more like that kind of level of importance in our lives? Isn’t it a lot less like saying: “Yeah, I guess I like dumplings.”? But this reminds us that so often in insurance, we’re only offered one choice that we can’t really understand very well, and that has lots of fine print we don’t even know about that negates our policy with ridiculously deceptive reasoning. (< See any natural disaster news story for insurance coverage issues.)

I think the problem with this ad is that this lady is obviously in cahoots with the Chinese waitress to try to force everyone to accept a product they don’t really want. And take this idea of being tricked into eating something you don’t really want just because you don’t understand the language: when used as a metaphor for insurance, doesn’t this remind you of the whole mortgage meltdown scam where banks tricked people into predatory loans by using a lot of gobbledygook and fine print, and then a big insurance company bet on this stuff using derivatives with no collateral? Honestly, I don’t think insurance companies are doing themselves any favors when they remind us of the fact that they are always using a confusing language (fine print presented in legalese) and incomprehensibly complex and misleading terms and conditions to trick us when we do any kind of business with them. They know what it is, but usually we don’t, and whether we like it or not, we’re going to get stuck with a dumpling, because it’s all we’re offered and we don’t know any better to ask for something else. And when I think about that, I’m repulsed by and distrustful of insurance companies! But wasn’t this supposed to be an ad for an insurance company? Well, it’s not a very good one, I’d say, because it reminds us of all this stuff.

I’m sorry, they have taken this ad down from the initial link I provided, and it appears to have been deleted from Mass Mutual’s website as well. But here’s a link to a web page that describes what happens in the spot (it’s the third paragraph down from the top):

http://www.massmutual.com/aboutmassmutual/newscenter/pressreleases/articledisplay?mmcom_articleid=3d4e2f7a89f58210VgnVCM100000d47106aaRCRD

I’m frankly surprised that they’ve removed all traces of this actual commercial, as they seemed very proud of it before, and it was still running on television regularly just a few short months ago.