It wasn’t selling cruises or insurance, but a beautiful ad during this year’s Super Bowl was actually selling the most globalized Jeep ever.
Chrysler didn’t go with a big celebrity to push the Jeep Renegade and if you missed the first glimpses of car in the early moments of the spot, you wouldn’t necessarily know what the ad was for. It’s fine, it’s just not like Chrysler of late.
But the ad, called “Beautiful Lands,” has greater significance for Jeep and the Renegade. Launched to the rest of the world before being introduced in its home market, and being built in Italy instead of anywhere in North America, this Jeep was made for the U.S., but mostly everyone else. That was a clumsy way of paraphrasing the lyrics to Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” sung in the Jeep ad by Marc Scibilia.
The tag at the end calls the Renegade, “America’s smallest, lightest SUV,” which is how badly Jeep wants to tell everyone this is the low-impact kind of SUV. Oh it’ll go lots of places, because you see it in Italy, Brazil, China, Japan, India and many other spots in a span of 90 seconds.
So a kind of slow ad, but a pretty one at least. And one that gets away without being too flashy or too complicated to prove its point, that the Jeep Renegade is intended to go just about anywhere and be appropriately sized for any country.
Get used to it, America.