To Put Springsteen In Super Bowl, Jeep Needed Big Cast Of Characters

Bruce Springsteen is the star of the two-minute advertisement for Jeep that is running during Super Bowl LV on Sunday, but a large cast of other important characters was required to get “The Boss” to make the first significant commercial endorsement in his half-century as a music maker and American cultural icon.

The other players included Olivier Francois, chief marketing officer of Stellantis (which includes the former Fiat Chrysler Automobiles); Jon Landau, Springsteen’s long-time agent; David DeMuth and Mike Stelmaszek of the Doner marketing agency in Michigan; Thom Zimny, a long-time director; frequent Springsteen musical collaborator Ron Aniello; Fiat Chrysler CEO Mike Manley — and even the late chief of Fiat Chrysler, Sergio Marchionne.

Their efforts culminated in “The Middle,” a two-minute appeal for national unity by Jeep and Springsteen that was released via social media early on Sunday and was scheduled to air during the second half of the Big Game played in Tampa. It immediately provided a new wrinkle not only for automotive advertising and Super Bowl commercials but also for the political debate that has deeply divided the American populace these days.

Regardless of how well “The Middle” is received by Americans, Francois was counting Springsteen’s participation in the Jeep commercial as a major accomplishment and a worthy bookend to a decade of outstanding Super Bowl spots that began with the company’s unlikely recruitment of Eminem to star in the seminal “Born of Fire” advertisement during the Super Bowl in 2011.

Francois appreciated the importance of Sunday’s Super Bowl moment and the burden to exceed, if possible, the company’s several exceptional Big Game statements of the last 10 years.

“The Super Bowl being what it is, it’s an expensive buy, so it’s only worth doing if you’re going to create an impression that will last years beyond your commercial,” Francois, the chief marketing officer of Fiat Chrysler and now of Stellantis, told me. “Born of Fire” was “probably the wisest investment we ever made, after the fact. Ten years later, people are still speaking of it. And it aired not even twice, but only once. It aired one day.

“So there’s a combination of expecting something strong and wanting to do something that’s going to leave a lasting impression. Clearly the bar is seriously higher than animals speaking, and literally what I started out with for this Super Bowl was animals singing. It was a perfect ad for the Super Bowl, but totally imperfect for my own Super Bowl standards.”

Francois also might have been excused for executing the sort of ad that could have provided another highly contextual bookend for 10 years of Fiat Chrysler Super Bowl spots, perhaps by revisiting “Born of Fire” and the slogan it berthed, “Imported From Detroit.” While the 2o11 commercial featured Eminem driving a now-defunct Chrysler sedan through a toothless Detroit cityscape and only finding some faint hope for the city’s comeback, an advertisement set in Motown of 2021 could have authentically struck a victorious tone. Not only has Detroit finally enjoyed an economic renaissance downtown and throughout much of the city, but Stellantis actually is completing the refurbishment of a big plant in Detroit that will build the new, largest Jeep model beginning later this year.

But instead, Francois dragged “The Middle” across the finish line with shooting in the Great Plains that occurred just a week before kickoff for Super Bowl LV, completing a saga that involved years of courting, activating key relationships, relying on allies in the marketing world, leveraging the trust of other key Stellantis executives, and heeding a wish from beyond the grave — as well as counting on a little luck.

Francois’s desire to recruit Springsteen for a Big Game ad this year stemmed from his relentless desire to use his company’s brands, especially Jeep SUVs and Ram trucks, to make compelling statements that communicate timeless values but also relate to the major dynamics of the zeitgeist. He has succeeded time and again in getting celebrities — sometimes unlikely ones — to help with this task.

Eminem was only the first. Francois also was able to get Clint Eastwood in 2012 and Bob Dylan in 2014 to star in such ads. Posthumously, he involved the famed radio commentator Paul Harvey in an ode to American agriculture in 2013. While the appearance of Bill Murray in a Jeep ad last year was a major coup for Francois because Murray is hilarious simply getting out of bed, “Groundhog Day” also had extra relevance, because Murray reprised his role in the movie Groundhog Day for Jeep just as the pandemic was starting to bring the promise that each day for Americans would seem pretty much like the day before, for some months.

And in a spot last year that introduced a concept for the first hybrid Jeep, Francois was able to get the widow and former collaborator of famed astronomer Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan, to authorize Francois to use parts of Sagan’s iconic “Pale Blue Dot” monologue about the environmental fragility of Earth.

The collage of relationships and initiatives that yielded “The Middle” arguably began at the top of what was then Fiat Chrysler. Marchionne, who via Fiat rescued the carcass of a bankrupt Chrysler from the lap of American taxpayers in 2009, happened to be a big fan of the music of The Boss. That was evident even to outsiders, as Marchionne often would have Springsteen tunes playing to introduce presentations to investors and analysts. Manley, who succeeded Marchionne upon the latter’s sudden death in 2019, certainly was aware of his predecessor’s passion.

Meanwhile, the French-born Francois, who also was running the Fiat brand in Italy for Marchionne, had become an ace student of American culture as Fiat Chrysler’s CMO. A former music producer, Francois also cultivated an extensive network of friends, acquaintances, contacts and influencers in the entertainment industry around the globe. That network was part of what yielded his success in getting Eminem, Murray and others to work with Fiat Chrysler in Super Bowl ads.

In the course of his work, Francois got to know Landau, a former journalist who’d profiled the young Springsteen for Rolling Stone nearly 50 years ago and soon was invited by the rising star to become his agent. Landau has served in that role ever since.

“I had the chance to meet Bruce Springsteen a couple of times over the years, to say ‘Hi,’ but my biggest luck was to meet Jon Landau and become a real friend,” Francois said. “I felt like he could see I was a good guy, that I wasn’t pushing for marketing at any cost. And as we thought about this idea of seeing if Bruce would work with us, over the years I served him with great ideas and scripts that he brought to Bruce — none of which came to reality.”

The main reason Francois couldn’t persuade Springsteen, even through Landau, to work with a Fiat Chrysler brand was that Springsteen simply didn’t do commercials — for anyone.

By last year, Francois was overjoyed to have gotten Murray, another hard-to-lasso endorser, to do the “Groundhog Day” ad for Jeep. But he’d tabled for the time being hopes of being able to follow up that success by recruiting The Boss. Francois didn’t bother to ask Fiat Chrysler’s various affiliated ad agencies to put together Springsteen briefs for Super Bowl LV.

But fortunately, executives at Doner, Fiat Chrysler’s regular agency in Detroit, continued to noodle the idea of how to get Springsteen involved with one of their client’s brands. Doner’s CEO, DeMuth, “is a huge and diehard Springsteen-ologist,” Francois said. “He gave his team the assignment of giving me a Bruce piece — in literally the first year that I hadn’t asked for one.”

Even after he got the unsolicited brief from Doner, Francois said, he “parked it, because we all know that Bruce Springsteen doesn’t do advertisements. Even I — Mr. Why Not, Mr. Dream Big, and, ‘Let’s do it’ — parked the bloody commercial in some corner of my computer.”

But then something serendipitous happened that, as has been the case with some of Francois’s biggest Super Bowl triumphs, gave him a shot at what he wanted in the eleventh hour. After responding to a New Year’s greeting by Landau, Francois recalled, he figured he might as well send him Doner’s script.

Doner had conceived and fleshed out its idea as an opportunity for Springsteen, via Jeep, to serve as a spokesman for national reunification in the wake of the social and political travails of the last year. Jeep would be the perfect brand vehicle for such a message, Doner knew, because of the strong identification of the SUV champion with America, the role of the first jeeps in winning World War II, and the independence inherent in the attitude of the off-roader who is the heart of Jeep’s clientele.

One aspect of the Doner brief that apparently caught Springsteen’s attention was to situate the commercial around the U.S. Center Chapel, a tiny structure in Lebanon, Kansas, in the geographic middle of the Lower 48. Stelmaszek, Doner’s executive vice president and creative director, came up with the notion of figuring the actual middle of the country in the creative by utilizing the chapel.

“Jon loved the idea as I described it to him and asked me to shoot the brief to him,” Francois said. Then even as the Super Bowl loomed just over a month away, Landau got back to Francois and said, “Bruce is willing to do it.” Francois immediately got a hold of Manley to get his buy-in and that of other top executives of what was by then the former Fiat Chrysler arm of Stellantis.

In a statement, Landau said, “Olivier Francois and I have been discussing ideas for the last ten years and when he showed us the outline for ‘The Middle,’ our immediate reaction was, ‘Let’s do it.’ Our goal was to do something surprising, relevant, immediate and artful.”

Springsteen “wanted to do something for his country,” Francois said. “The country obviously is fraught with emotion on all sides. He wanted to take a stand, but stand in the middle.”

Doner’s concept didn’t change much, Francois said, but Springsteen “took the script and rewrote it a little bit. If he’s in, he’s all in, so he wanted to make it in his own words.”

Zimny, whom Francois called “a great filmmaker,” obviously weighed in on the cinematography and more. And before shooting took place on a telescoped schedule last week in Kansas, Nebraska and Colorado, Springsteen got more and more involved in the Jeep ad. Consideration was given to using some of his seminal music. But instead, Springsteen wrote a fresh score along with frequent collaborator Aniello, including intensifying the instrumentals at the end of the ad to underscore the stakes involved in the message The Boss is conveying, Francois said.

“My only little win was that I convinced [Springsteen] to create some stronger notes at the end, after his” voiceover, Francois said. “We wanted to deliver a message of hope. And the music at the end, when he’s done speaking and ‘praying,’ gets to another level of the melody and builds up a sense of hope.”

Francois offered to make any advertising shoot as easy as possible on The Boss — film it at his ranch in New Jersey, maybe even “in the comfort of his living room, and we could just post-produce” most of the ad, Francois said. “But he said no, and for ‘The Middle,’ he took a plane and landed on Sunday [January 31] at 8 a.m. on the day of a snowstorm in Hastings, Nebraska. He flew there because he didn’t want to have to fake anything.

“Our first real working meeting on the ad,” Francois said, “was on a plane on the tarmac of this small airport. It was the only place that was warm enough.” Post-production took place mainly in some rooms of a Holiday Inn in Hastings, he said.

As “The Middle” was coming together through this melange of factors and against some initially tough odds, Francois said, he contemplated that “magic is something you can’t plan for. And if we really want to make history with our commercials in the Super Bowl, apparently we have to rely not just on great connections but on magic and luck.”