He’s been called The Boss, the Boardwalk Balladeer, and Steinbeck in Leather, but up until now no one has called him a pitchman. Bruce Springsteen has been in the public eye for over 45 years, but he’s never lent his name, voice or likeness to endorse a product. That ends with today’s Super Bowl ad for Jeep.
But before you hurl your copy of The Wild, The Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle into the fire and call the man a sellout, know that his is an unusual ad, and there’s a bit of a story here.
As detailed in Variety, the commercial, which was filmed on location in Lebanon, Kansas, the precise center of the lower 48, just last Sunday, and many executives at Jeep’s parent company Stellantis only learned this was happening a few weeks ago.
Marketing chief Olivier François has tried and failed to get Springsteen to represent his brand for a decade. Hard to blame anyone considering how much car culture and Springsteen are entwined. (“Sprung from cages out on Highway 9/Chrome wheeled, fuel-injected, and steppin’ out over the line/Ohhhhhhhh!” is just one of many examples.) “Bruce is not for sale. He’s not even for rent,” François said of his many overtures to the singer-songwriter.
However, this particular ad, called The Middle, really does feel less like a product endorsement than an opportunity to talk some sense about common ground to the widest of all possible audiences during a politically fraught moment.
Springsteen’s own 1980 Jeep CJ-5 makes an appearance (mitigating any “but does he actually like Jeep?” questions) , and as Road & Track points out, there aren’t even any new Jeep models in the spot.
The Middle runs two minutes, which meant François had to make some late-in-the-fourth-quarter calls to CBS to rearrange their preexisting airtime buy. It will take up an entire ad break. Springsteen and producer Ron Aniello recorded the echoey guitar and violin themselves.
It is unclear if The Boss, whose autobiography Born to Run ran over 500 pages, wrote the copy himself, but he is said to have been “intimately involved” with the spot’s director, Thom Zimny. Zimny has been at the helm of all of Springsteen’s recent documentary projects, Letter to You, Western Stars, Springsteen on Broadway, and The Ties That Bind, and has also directed films about Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley.
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