Super Bowl Sunday is notorious for airing the most comical and sometimes controversial commercials to grab the audience’s attention. But where is the limit?
Last Sunday’s highly anticipated line-up of commercials during the Super Bowl certainly disappointed some Americans this year.
Jeep’s “Beautiful Lands” commercial featuring one of the United States’ most popular and patriotic songs in history, “This Land is Our Land,” took viewers through a tour of the world in a Jeep, stopping at major landmarks such as the Great Wall of China and the Grand Canyon.
Viewers then took to Twitter to express a wide range of opinions about the commercial, including anger over the use of a two-second shot of a Muslim woman in a Hijab.
However, the real issue was the use of images from foreign countries in an American commercial.
“I’m not talking about the woman at all in the Jeep commercial, I’m talking about the foreign lands,” Twitter user @FlyOSUBuckeye1 said about his publicized criticism of the Jeep commercial.
Obviously, Jeep was attempting to market the company’s global appeal to the 115.3 million Superbowl viewers, but Jeep missed the mark by targeting beyond the American audience. Besides America, Canada and Mexico, only a few million people see the Super Bowl in other countries, and most are likely to be native U.S. citizens, according to CNN.
In recent events, the common theme of advertisements has been their failure to consult with appropriate target markets to gain approval. Instead, they have been releasing inappropriate commercials that can often be offensive and controversial.
Advertisers do it intentionally and release controversial commercials just for the sake of being talked about. Any press is supposedly good press, but when does it cross boundaries and become unsettling?
Nick Salcedo, a third year geography student at California State University, Long Beach, thought the Jeep commercial crossed a line.
“The commercial was a little excessive showing different nationalities of people going through different countries,” Salcedo said. “It was kind of confusing, and I didn’t know what car was being advertised. Bottom line is, it’s a car commercial and it just became too much.
The controversy surrounding the Jeep commercial can be understood from a patriot’s standpoint, not through the bigotry seen in hateful posts on social media about the global diversity shown in the commercial.
Jordan Robinson is a fourth year journalism major with an emphasis in public relations.