The Super Bowl Ad That Got It Wrong

Every year during the Super Bowl there are much anticipated advertisements, and due to the sheer number of people watching, any little slip up will be scrutinized by millions. So companies, along with advertising agencies, spend millions of dollars on the ideas, celebrity participation and execution (production value).

This year Dodge got into some controversy with a truck commercial that appropriated the out of context words of Martin Luther King Jr.

Here is the ad:

On the face of things, you would hope that we live in a society where some things are off limits. You would hope that the guys working on ad agencies wearing big yellow glasses with spiky hair would refrain from replacing the object of an MLK speech (what is needed to engage in social justice and public service) with that of a brand. But perhaps that's too much to hope for.

However, somewhat encouragingly, the viewership (at least a portion of the public) seems to have noticed the manifestly un-fittingness of this move and called it out on social media. Twitter was ablaze with comments on the hubris of Dodge in replacing concepts of public service with themselves.

Finally, in a brilliant move, someone re-mixed the audio with words from Martin Luther King, DIFFERENT words, about the evils of advertising. They then uploaded that version to YouTube and it went viral.

What we see from this is that Martin Luther's message cannot be taken hostage. He was a bigger man than that and his message cannot be bought. He was after justice in the world, and would not allow the forces of his time stand in the way of progress, justice, peace and virtue. We might think that the attempt to associate a brand worth these larger virtues is only a small lie, a forgivable infraction in a media environment awash with similar truth-bending white lies. But MLK was precisely the kind of man, with precisely the kind of message that pushed back against these seemingly small infractions. In our modern world it is so often the case that small decisions made by many of us can add up to huge problems for all of us, like racism, micro-aggressions, environmental infractions and so on. So it is fitting that Martin Luther King himself here calls out the makers of this commercial, letting the world know that this is not okay.

Perhaps this year's Dodge commercial is equivalent to last year's Pepsi fiasco. Let's hope that the public has sufficient energy to slap the wrists of these advertisers, and let them know that they have crossed a line.