The minute-long ad opens with a solitary student dozing off in a cavernous library. Startled by a flickering medieval Emeralite lamp, she looks up as a vaulted ceiling opens into a wider dreamscape: steam, clouds, sweeping beams of light; the rising spires of skyscraper-like wind turbines, whose graceful rotation echoes the slow-motion fan blades of the GE9X engines powering passing jets. The narration ends with a scientific truth as the winds of change bring new horizons: “The first law of thermodynamics states that energy cannot be created or destroyed,” she says. But it can be passed on to the next generation.
“Beautiful Law” is the final ad to be released by GE, the iconic company founded by Thomas Edison in the late 19th century, before launching GE Aerospace and GE Vernova as separate, public companies in spring 2024. (GE HealthCare was spun off from GE in early 2023. The campaign boldly embraces the future, tapping into the company’s deep roots in energy and aviation, and drawing deeply from the storytelling tradition that defined GE from the beginning. “We are the sons and daughters of Thomas Edison,” said Linda Boff, GE’s chief marketing officer, who has led GE’s marketing efforts for nearly a decade. “Our mission has always been to ensure that the marketing we do — advertising, content, creative — is as innovative as the GE products themselves. To infuse our work with the spirit of invention that has always defined our company and our brand.”
Looking back at GE’s earliest efforts in mainstream advertising, the brand defined itself with its glamour and fascination with the emerging technologies of each era, from radios and televisions to dishwashers and refrigerators—in many ways embodying the American century itself. “Even in the early days, our work emphasized that we were a forward-looking company,” Boff said. “There was always a sense of relevance to the times we were in.”
In a departure from the closed social mores of early 1920s America, GE print ads like The Suffrage and the Switch combined the enlightenment power of the light switch with the right to vote won by American women, flicking the page for a more equitable company. Subsequent decades of old-fashioned GE The ads also showcased the cultural who’s who of America, who defined it to itself and the world. Under the same roof of creative output, it said, lived Groucho Marx and Mr. Magoo, Bette Davis and Frank Sinatra.
Meanwhile, over the decades, the company’s slogans—from “Progress is our most important product” to “We bring good things to life” to “Imagination at work” to “Building a world that works”—reflected the company’s central role in adding light where it once was dark, bringing electricity to more homes and enabling families to take to the skies for business and pleasure. Not to mention sending a man to the moon.
Never forgotten is Hedy Lamarr, the perplexing genius whose off-screen inventions included the wartime development of frequency-hopping technology, which is at the heart of today’s Wi-Fi, GPS and Bluetooth systems. Lamarr’s presence in GE’s postwar-era ads can be seen as a hallmark of the company’s ongoing pioneering efforts to embrace emerging media. In 1954, GE hired a 33-year-old actor named Ronald Reagan to host the national television show General Electric Theater. Theater, which delves into the research, engineering, and manufacturing behind its new innovations, while in 2015 it teamed up with Oscar-winning producers Brian Grazer and Ron Howard to create the NatGeo series Breakthrough, in which Howard and five other directors delved beneath the surface of known innovations to craft six hours of dynamic storytelling and engaging visuals. Also that year, GE Podcast Theater launched its tech-savvy sci-fi drama The Message.
These forays into more imaginative spaces and emerging media like Vine and Instagram date back decades, and even successfully ventured into the fantasy world of comic books, for which the company recruited Batman artist George “Inky” Roussos and others to create wildly successful real-life science adventures. Through these efforts, GE has learned to value its luck in making products that have their own appeal to certain segments of society—key to achieving what Boff calls “borrowed equity and cultural relevance.”
“That means having outsiders bring their own interesting perspectives and perspectives to our work,” she explains. Those outside perspectives can range from Oscar-winning directors to the British science geeks behind YouTube phenomenon The Slow Mo Guys, a duo that visited GE’s global research labs to capture video of magnetic fluids meeting new super-hydrophobic surfaces; it garnered 14 million views. “I think our job in marketing is to find kaleidoscopic ways to tell these stories, always staying true to our DNA but being modern and relevant,” Boff adds. GE did this with cutting-edge sound on the SoundCloud EDM track “Drop Science,” which DJ Matthew Dear spun from thousands of hours of ambient recordings from GE factories. They did it with aerial video, equipping employees at five U.S. plants with equipment to capture drone footage inside those factories. They even dabbled in high fashion, enabling designer Zac Posen to use a 3D printing process to create parts for the GE9X engine so he could use it to make the 3D-fabricated gown he wore to the Met Gala in New York. In late 2022, GE made one of the biggest splashes ever in print media, partnering with The New York Times to create a historic edition of the legendary newspaper, taking over print advertising for the first time, dedicating 27 full pages to GE’s technology and people.
“There’s no doubt that what GE does is important to the world,” Boff said. “As one of our agency partners said, the challenge has always been to make the important interesting.” Over the 132 years, GE has reinvented itself, and the brand story has evolved as well. As the company prepares to launch three independent, industry-leading companies sometime in early Q2 2024, the brand’s DNA will lay the foundation for GE Vernova, GE Aerospace, and GE HealthCare to continue telling the story of innovation while shaping their own new narratives. Director Frederic Planchon has crafted a story in “The Beauty Rule” that ends GE’s opening era on an exciting, hopeful note.“This ad is moving because it’s also a love letter to GE,” Boff explained. “It’s exciting because it reflects our pride and love for this company and its future.”
Now, that future is up to the marketers and communicators of the three independent companies to pass that DNA on to the next generation. “The line we ended The Beauty Code with — ‘GE, always, now, forever’ — is so true,” Boff said. “The fact that the company is reinventing itself as three independent GE-branded companies is the greatest innovation in so many ways.”
