The Autos are back, having secured more than half of the spots in the Super Bowl – with Chrysler’s ‘Imported From Detroit‘ stealing the show. Watching TV the other night with my wife Danielle, she turned my attention to Chrysler’s latest installment, featuring Portland’s own Ndomukong Suh, entitled ‘Homecoming‘.
I’m a huge football fan, and an even bigger fan of my home city, so marrying the two and showing off Portland on a national stage with a newly crowned NFL star clearly appeals to my emotion. Wanting to see the spot again, I searched high and low on the interwebs for the advertisement. To no avail. Turning next to my social network, specifically Twitter, I asked where to find it of my followers. Before long, I got this note from Josh Smith, pointing me to Mike Driehorst of Chrysler PR who mentioned that Chrysler doesn’t always post to YouTube right when a spot airs. After some back and forth (along with an objective that I’m sure was not on his ‘To Do’ list), Mike came through with the following message:
Hat tip, Mike. Well done, Chrysler. Your new slate of advertisements are brilliant. Your customer service, stellar. Thank you for showing off our beautiful city in such a well produced manner.
“Show where you’re going without forgetting where you’re from.”
As you’ve seen by my last few posts, I took a pretty good look at the Super Bowl ads this year. In my opinion, most fell short of the mark from past Super Bowls. There were a few that resonated with me for different reasons. Volkswagen with the previously mentioned ‘The Force‘ spot, as well as the introduction of the new VW Beetle – cute and well executed spots. I thought Planters did a great job with their stop motion spot entitled ‘Alejandro‘ for their almond line. I’m biased – it was done here in Portland by Laika/House. I always love local companies making good on the big stage.
Finally, the spot I thought evoked the most EMOTION in me was by Chrysler – ‘Imported From Detroit‘ (created by Wieden+Kennedy here in PDX). This is a city and a community that has been kicked in the head repeatedly as we’ve hit the economic downturn. As one of my co-workers stated, the spot connects and re-connects with almost every line. For someone that has never been to Detroit, nor really considered it a place I’d be interested in visiting, I had that opinion altered with the cinematography as Slim Shady navigated his Chrysler throughout the city. Someone else described the ad as an ode to the motor city, with a bit of product placement. That’s a spot on assessment. You’ll never see this aired again on broadcast TV in it’s original format – at 2 minutes long, it’s outside the boundaries of a normal 30 second commercial. It is getting plenty of run on YouTube however, with 4.5M views and counting. Well done Chrysler. Never forget where you came from.