Ring ran a heartwarming Super Bowl ad. A lost dog. A neighborhood of cameras. AI scans the footage. The dog gets found. The family is reunited. It was well-made and genuinely cute.
You know who didn’t think it was cute? The internet. Comments piled up fast: ‘Dystopian.’ ‘Terrifying.’ ‘Mass surveillance wrapped in a puppy.’
Within a week, Ring cancelled a major partnership. The founder started an apology tour. The company scrambled to explain that the feature people were upset about was… exactly what the product does. They apologized for accurately describing their own product.
This is a teaching moment, and not the one Ring intended.
There is a moment in every crisis when you have to make a clear-eyed decision: did we do something wrong, or did people not like what they heard? Those situations require completely different responses.
If you lied, own it immediately. If you did something harmful, fix it and say so. But if you told the truth and people didn’t like what they heard, that is not the time to grovel. The moment you apologize for something that’s true, you confirm every fear the crowd already had. You take ‘maybe this is a problem’ and turn it into ‘they know it’s a problem.’
Ring’s ad didn’t malfunction. Their communications did. They had a legitimate product doing what it was designed to do. They should have stood behind it — calmly, honestly, with respect for the concerns people raised — while making clear they weren’t going to apologize for making the thing they set out to make.
The wrong apology is worse than no apology at all. It trades your credibility for a moment of temporary pressure relief, and the pressure doesn’t even go away.