People have a disgust response to corporations attempting to subvert our human-focused emotional responses towards their companies. It’s abusive in a sense, the same reason why people get incredibly upset when corporations try and capitalize on children, or martyrs, or movements.

It’s because fundamentally they are playing a trick, and they know it. They’re trying to take a far bigger, greater thing than them, and capitalize it. The capitalization of our most dear values is, really, quite disgusting and a very modern phenomenon. While they were figuring out ways to do it all the way back in the 60s, there’s a certain shamelessness to it now that is maddening. Probably because they way they do it today, like in this case, it’s easy to believe that entire ad teams have been raised in such a corrupted moral environment that that actually do not even understand why what they’re doing is reprehensible, and that blindness/greed combo is especially icky (cheapening/devaluing core cultural values for a quick buck, and not even able acknowledge it as such).