Ad of the Day: Robert Downey Jr. Surprises a 7-Year-Old With a Bionic ‘Iron Man’ Arm

There are good ways to use your megafame, and bad ways to use your megafame. Robert Downey Jr. has happened upon one of the best ways to use his—by drawing attention to Limbitless, a company that makes 3-D-printed prostheses, and the recipient of one, a 7-year-old named Alex who really likes superheroes.

With Downey to help out, Limbitless made Alex an Iron Man arm. And Iron Man himself gave it to him, as you can see in the video below. So, you know, get ready to ugly cry.

Limbitless is a part of Microsoft's large-scale charity operation The Collective Project, which is being used to market OneNote, a mildly boring cloud-based project management program Microsoft sells.

The point of the campaign, which is honestly just objectively good use of marketing dollars any way you slice it, is to demonstrate the kinds of things you can get done with mildly boring project management software, like funding students in Collective Project to do things like build awesome robot arms for people with disabilities and help impoverished orphans (see below).

Both inspirational videos have a brief pitch for OneNote at the end. Sure, it's manipulative, but ad dollars seem to have gone to do genuinely good things, and that's great to see.

Also the tiny little Iron Man hand in the big grownup Iron Man hand.

Excuse me.