Prairie dogs look on as Jeep plug-in hybrids traverse their territory in a new Super Bowl. ad.
Jeep has enjoyed one of the highest perches among automotive brands advertising in the Super Bowl over the last several years, leveraging its trailblazing position in off-roading with strong doses of Americana, clever storytelling and megawatt celebrities to enhance its status as the icon of SUVs.
Now, in today’s Super Bowl telecast, the Stellantis-owned brand will add a significant new wrinkle to its Big Game resume: an appeal to viewers’ sensibilities about sustainability, by featuring two hybrid-electric Jeep models amid a lovefest of animals “dancing” in the wild.
The 60-second commercial titled “Electric Boogie” celebrates Jeep’s continuing expansion into electrified models with species from across the animal kingdom dancing to an all-new version of the iconic song that was created specifically for the Big Game ad.
The video will debut during the Super Bowl in North America and then roll out globally across the Jeep brand’s social-media landscape.
“In the beginning, I wasn’t crazy about dancing animals,” Olivier Francois, global chief marketing officer for Stellantis, told me. “I really don’t find them terribly exciting, though I understand they’re super cute. But when the idea came up about using the song, I knew that most of America would be able to relate to it.”
Jeep intensified advertising of its plug-in hybrid Wrangler in 2022 with the release of an ad titled “Earth Odyssey” that fused a version of “Also Sprach Zarathustra,” known popularly as the theme from the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, with actual sounds made by many animals. Its idea was to highlight how quiet the Wrangler 4xe is when moving through nature.
And Francois noted that, in producing “Electric Boogie,” Stellantis “obvoiusly was respectful of nature; we were very careful with that.”
Stellantis actually had prepared a form of the “Electric Boogie” ad potentially for last year’s Super Bowl, but then withdrew the plan because supply-chain snarls — which were at their height for the global auto industry back then — interfered. “Why advertise a vehicle you can’t buy?” Francois said. “It’s almost a disrespect to the customer.”
Kicking “Electric Boogie” ahead to this year’s Big Game allowed Francois and the brand chiefs at Jeep to bring together the reggae song’s original recording artist, Marcia Griffiths, with recording artist and producer Shaggy, and three up-and-coming female artists: Jamila Falak, Amber Lee and Moyann. Griffiths’ first recording of the song nearly 40 years ago “made a huge impact on popular culture,” Francois noted in a press release. Jeep brought Griffiths together with Shaggy to create a modernized version of the song, which will be available on streaming services today.
“It would be nice in terms of Jeep global relevance on the pop-culture stage if that [new version of the] song could live by itself, which is why we’re trying to connect the song as soon as possible to our commercial, and Jeep is in the early stages of a music video of it,” Francois said.
