Sorry Clint Eastwood: Another Chrysler ad broke through
COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Chrysler's most pivotal commercial in recent years wasn't the Super Bowl ad with Eminem in 2011.
And it wasn't this year's Super Bowl ad with Clint Eastwood.
The most important Chrysler commercial in recent years made its debut in June 2010 for the Jeep Grand Cherokee.
Skeptical?
Both Chrysler and Fiat CEO Sergio Marchionne along with John Jay, the global executive creative director for Wieden + Kennedy, agree the commercial for the Jeep Grand Cherokee symbolized a new chapter for the company's products and its marketing. (See it below)
Jay, in a discussion in Columbus, Ohio, this week with Marchionne, said the commercial for the Jeep Grand Cherokee was the most important work that the Portland, Ore.-based agency has done for Chrysler.
"The Jeep was a turning point for Chrysler and was when our working relationship and creative work moved to a next level," Jay said. "There was so much at stake for that car to prove there was a new Chrysler in its devotion to product quality."
Wieden + Kennedy is Chrysler's main advertising agency for the company's Chrysler and Dodge brands. The agency also created the Super Bowl commercials with Eminem and Clint Eastwood.
The agency and Chrysler almost immediately had a good working chemistry when Jay met Chrysler's Chief Marketing Officer Olivier Francois in 2009, Jay said.
Chrysler was looking for a company that could help rebuild the image of its brands and Wieden + Kennedy prides itself on helping companies convey their values to consumers.
"Are you a brand that has something to say? Then say it," Jay said during the discussion hosted by the Wexner Center for the Arts.
Perhaps the agency's most famous campaign is its work for Nike and the slogan "Just do it," coined by Dan Wieden in the late 1980s.
But it still took time and effort to get Chrysler's marketing right.
In meetings that took place before the new Jeep Grand Cherokee was launched in 2010, Jay said the ad agency kept hearing Chrysler talk about how important quality would be as it launched its redesigned SUV.
"And so we really riffed on that pride in workmanship," Jay said.
The commercial casts Chrysler's manufacturing process as part of an American tradition spanning from the construction of railroad lines to cotton gins to skyscrapers.
"This was once a country where people made things, beautiful things, and so it is again," the narrator says to music that is set to the cadence of an automotive plant's stamping presses.
Marchionne recalled how Chrysler decided to delay the launch of the Jeep Grand Cherokee so the company could make sure it went smoothly.
That decision, Marchionne said, cost the company millions but was the right decision to make.
"That was a turning point because it was the first car coming out of the company since its bankruptcy," Marchionne said. "And we tweaked that commercial until the very end."
Jay said the ad was designed not just to introduce the Jeep Grand Cherokee, but also to lay the groundwork for the automaker's future marketing campaigns. Chrysler's Super Bowl commercial with Eminem in 2011 and Clint Eastwood this year were built on that foundation, Jay said.
Under Wieden + Kennedy, Chrysler's commercials have been serious, even wordy, and have cast the company as a champion of American values such as hard work and resolve.
"One of the things that we talk about with Wieden + Kennedy is their ability to read the mood of the country," Marchionne said. "And that is an incredibly difficult art. It is not a science."