Peloton - Sex and the City Clapback

On December 9th, 2021, the premiere episode of And Just Like That - HBO's Sex and the City reboot - killed off Mr. Big with a heart attack. After a Peloton ride. Nobody at Peloton had any idea it was coming. Within hours, our stock had dropped 11%. Social media had written our obituary.

We had a choice: go quiet and let the narrative run, or own it. We chose to own it, and quickly.

Over that weekend, we partnered with Ryan Reynolds' Maximum Effort studio to produce a clapback. The creative conceit was simple and irresistible: Big hadn't died. He'd run away with one of our instructors. We got Chris Noth back on screen, shot the ad, had Ryan Reynolds provide the VO, and published it on Sunday, less than 72 hours after the episode aired.

The response was everything the crisis wasn't. The film was covered globally, earned tens of millions of organic impressions, and reframed the conversation entirely. Mark Ritson called it "snatching victory from the jaws of death." That felt about right.

It remains one of the fastest, most visible pieces of reactive marketing in recent memory, and a reminder that the best crisis comms rarely look like crisis comms at all.