Irony alert: AIG's ad reel
Do you remember the good old days, back before AIG exploded all over us in a flaming explosion of ineptitude, arrogance and greed? Back when AIG was a somewhat mysterious financial megacorp with a series of slick, smug ads, many of them starring annoyingly precocious children?
You don't have to remember, because the ads are still there on YouTube, in all their preening, presumptuous glory. Looking at them now, each ad now positively drenched in irony, we can see AIG's faults writ large: the arrogance, the self-satisfaction, the insistence that AIG knew the ins and outs of money better than everyone, and that anyone who didn't go with AIG was a fuddy-duddy forever stuck in Squaresville, USA.
Like this little masterpiece, which informs us somberly that "the greatest risk is not taking one."
Or this one, in which the AIG logo is transformed into an Olympic champion.
Then there's this one, in which the aforementioned precocious children discuss "risk management" and conclude that parents who go with AIG "rock!"
Naturally, some clever Internetter has reworked the ending to this memorable addition to the precocious children series [rewritten one]:
(Here's the original:)
If watching all these ads has made you as angry as it made me, here's a little antidote. It's 58 seconds of kittens. They're not selling anything. They make no special claims to financial expertise. They'll never take millions in bonuses or demand billions in bailout money. They're just kittens, and they're really, really interested in this cardboard box.
–David Futrelle






