Springsteen's ad for Jeep from the center of the contiguous states was no masterpiece, but didn't deserve urban insult

A marker for the nearby geographic center of the 48 contiguous states (Photo from Google Maps)

By Al Cross

Director, Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, University of Kentucky

As the not-so-Super Bowl was winding down, one of the two-minute commercial breaks was occupied by one ad, by a superstar who had never done one before: Bruce Springsteen. The musician from the country's most urbanized area went to a very rural place, the geographic center of the 48 contiguous states, to make a pitch for Jeep, and for healing the country.

Google map, adapted

Just northwest of Lebanon, Kansas, population 218, stands a monument marking the center (which is on a nearby farm). On the same plot of ground is a tiny chapel that, inside and out, is the centerpiece of the ad, now on Jeep's website. 

"All are more than welcome to come meet here in the middle," Springsteen says. "It's no secret the middle has been a hard place to get to lately, between red and blue, between servant and citizen, between our freedom and our fear. Now, fear has never been the best of who we are, and as for freedom, it's not the property of just the fortunate few, it belongs to us all. Whoever you are, wherever you're from, it's what connects us, and we need that connection. We need the middle. We just have to remember the very soil we stand on is common ground, so we can get there. We can make it to the mountaintop through the desert, and we will cross this divide. Our light has always found its way through the darkness. And there's hope on the road up ahead." The ad ended with a dedication: "To the ReUnited States of America."

Chris Richards, The Washington Post's pop music critic, was not impressed. "Springsteen was famous for refusing to cave to advertisers across his 48-year career, but now here he is on our Super Bowl screens, squinting into the middle distance like a parody of himself," Richards wrote after seeing a preview. "Despite the healing sound of his voice, Springsteen is ultimately preaching reconciliation without reckoning — which after January’s Capitol siege is no longer an acceptable path toward progress. Plus, this is Bruce Springsteen. Isn’t he the guy who’s supposed to know everything about hard work? Suggesting that we should all swiftly and metaphorically travel to the nucleus of White, rural America to make up and move along feels insulting and wrong."

It's Richards who is insulting and wrong. Hard work and rural America go hand in glove, and while Jeep's message is heavy on clichés and light on memorable points, we don't need liberal urbanites (Richards also slammed fossil fuels, though Jeep is developing electrics) discouraging multi-million-dollar messages that are aimed at helping people in our country find common ground – especially those from an urban Democrat reaching out to increasingly Republican rural America.

"Springsteen is a Democratic Party donor and was a sharp critic of former President Donald Trump," CNN reports. "He voted for President Joe Biden and performed "Land of Hope and Dreams" at his inauguration last month."

In The New Yorker, Amanda Petrusich has a better take: "Whether or not the Jeep commercial inflates your sense of national unity will likely have something to do with whether or not you’ve fully metabolized that [Jan. 6] event and have somehow—bless you—already arrived at a place of magnanimity and healing. There is, at least, something exquisitely and singularly American about a message of political unity being delivered by a rich and cloistered celebrity who has long been positioned as an Everyman savior, while he is simultaneously selling cars, partway through a football game being held before a not insignificant crowd in the midst of a global pandemic."

Springsteen was more than just paid talent, based on what Oliver Francois, chief marketing officer for Jeep parent Stellantis, told Brian Steinberg of Variety. It took Jeep 10 years of persuasion to get The Boss to do his first TV commercial, and he agreed to do it only last month, Steinberg reports: "Jeep offered to let him film scenes at his home in New Jersey, then mix them in with footage captured at the Kansas church, but Springsteen insisted on flying out to the chapel a week ago."

Francois said Springsteen thought the concept was spiritual: “He looked at this as a prayer,” and “felt it was time for him to be this guy in the middle of America, talking to America from this little chapel in the epicenter of America, and stand for the middle and nothing else. . . . He spent 12 hours on site. He was totally hands-on about the editing. He was very, very, very active with the editing and the process. He knew what he wanted, and he got what he wanted. . . .I hope, really hope, that this will be understood. We acted in good faith, and as good people, and trying to do this thing for the greater good. Now, it will be in the public domain and we will see what happens, but I have no regrets.”

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