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Ashley Madison's New Ads Target Key Demographic of People Who Hate Their Lives

Marriage is dark and full of existential terrors, according to a business that wants to facilitate affairs.
Allison Tierney

Image via YouTube

A year after the infamous hack on Ashley Madison, the extramarital affair dating company is in the middle of a serious rebranding and has just released its first TV commercials ever. But instead of the salacious cheating-on-your-wife-is-sexy angle, the ads have a decidedly different mood: Life is a deeply sad entrapment you will never escape, so maybe find a stranger on the internet to sleep with in order to dull the pain.

The ads center on despondent, white, middle-aged people in business casual desperately alone or stuck in marriages they don't want to be in (despite, you know, the fact that it's pretty acceptable and commonplace to get a divorce by now in Western society) set to melancholy indie music.

The new CEO of "Ruby"—which is what the site's parent company Avid Life is now calling itself following the hack that released Ashley Madison users' personal information—told Mashable about the ads: "This is the start of a journey. We feel like we're setting the right tone here, but we're hoping to build trust in the long-term."

Let's take a look at what exactly CEO Rob Segal considers to be the "right tone":

A blond woman stares at the computer blankly, rolls her eyes at her partner during couples therapy, and slices cucumbers in the saddest manner you could possibly cut up vegetables. Plot twist: She heads to a business conference and exchanges a smile with a white-haired, Trivago-like dude at the check-in desk.

A man eats breakfast, toast with jam and orange juice, so you might think you're watching an antidepressant ad rather than one for a dating site. Then he gets on the subway and exchanges a smile with a neutrally attractive woman.

The most miserable, white, painfully normal couple meet a redheaded woman at a get-together and grasp each other's hands as they presumably contemplate about how banging her together could temporarily relieve the pain that being stuck in a loveless marriage has created.

Each ad ends with Ashley Madison's new tagline: "Find your moment"—that moment, apparently, being a glimmer of hope found in a bland stranger's facial expression that temporarily makes you forget how much you hate your life.

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Read: A Guy in Australia Was Sentenced for Biting the Head off a Live Rat

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