ideas-gone-wrong

Responsibility Illustrated

Hamilton Nolan · 03/25/08 04:21PM

Here's a good look at Liberty Mutual's feast of responsibility: the simplistic blog post on ResponsibilityProject.com that the company was seeking to promote by buying up deceased ad executive Paul Tilley's name in Google Adwords. "When a 40-year-old Chicago advertising executive named Paul Tilley died recently, the cause of death was officially ruled suicide," the post says. "But some believe that Tilley was metaphorically pushed by a steady stream of malicious comments anonymously posted about him online in the weeks before he took his life." Well, the investigators got it all wrong, then! We also notice that they've bought the word "responsibility." And after the jump, you can watch one of the site's responsibility-promoting films: "A man is just another passenger on a bus until he comes face to face with a thief. And a choice." So he chose to steal a dead guy's name to sell insurance, right? Surprisingly, no!