[imagesource: Rob DeMartin for Jeep]

In advertising, as is often true with life in general, timing is everything.

Some South African brands have carved out a niche for themselves with their quick-witted quips, taking advantage of trending news stories to get maximum traction and exposure online.

If you want to air an advert during the Super Bowl, there’s no getting around the costs involved, with a 30-second spot costing an average of $5,6 million (around R80 million).

There were 57 minutes of commercials aired during the game, so it’s a good gig for broadcasters.

We’ve already run through a list of the best and worst Super Bowl adverts, which is very subjective, and the ad that was filmed right here in Cape Town, but what if you work out which is the worst ad based on return on its investment?

Using that metric, it’s clear that the Jeep ad featuring Bruce ‘The Boss’ Springsteen was a colossal waste of money, and timing played a big role in that, too.

Via Fortune, we set the scene:

Jeep’s commercial stood out from the crowd in a few ways. It was the longest at two minutes. It showed Bruce Springsteen driving across a flat, wintery Kansas landscape to a tiny chapel at the geographic center of the lower 48 states.

His voice-over narration extols the value of being “in the middle”—“a hard place to get to lately,” he says, but “we need the middle.” At the end, the words “To the ReUnited States of America” appear across a map of the U.S.

What could be wrong with a highly produced, uplifting message urging Americans to come together?

I’m sure the idea sounded good in boardrooms, but has Jeep been paying any attention over the past four-plus years? There is no middle, and there is no coming together.

Here’s the ad before we carry on:

It was immediately apparent from the social media reactions that any idea of reuniting the country was a reach:

After surveying Twitter and Instagram reactions to the Super Bowl ads, Adweek deemed “Middle” the “most divisive” of them all. Equal numbers loved it and hated it.

After an extraordinarily bitter election, it seems quite a few people on both sides are still furious. They’re in no mood to meet in the middle; they want to defeat the enemy.

Adweek reports that the Talkwalker brand analysis firm found net sentiment toward the Jeep brand to be –22% after the Super Bowl.

Just airing a two-minute commercial would have been in the double-digit US dollar millions (advertisers often get a volume discount on longer commercials), and you come out with a net sentiment of -22%? That stings.

Then, just a few days later, news breaks that Springsteen was arrested for drunk driving back in November.

The details surrounding the arrest remain contentious, and Springsteen’s blood-alcohol content was 0.02, which is way under New Jersey’s legal limit of 0.08, but it was another kick in the teeth for Jeep, which pulled the advert from its YouTube channel.

Meanwhile, other Super Bowl commercials are racking up millions of views across social media.

Hiring ‘The Boss’ doesn’t come cheap, either:

It’s impossible even to guess how much Springsteen got, but consider that until last Sunday, he had never endorsed a for-profit business in his career. Bob Dylan has done it (in 2014 for another Stellantis brand, Chrysler, during Super Bowl XLVIII), but not Springsteen.

Variety reports that Stellantis chief marketing officer Olivier Francois had been pursuing him as a spokesman for a decade. Combine all those factors, and “Middle” may be one of the most expensive TV commercials ever.

Maybe even the most expensive.

There’s a chance it was possibly the most expensive TV commercial ever made, the net sentiment was negative even before Springsteen was arrested, and now the ad has been pulled.

All in all, you could make a decent argument for it being the worst Super Bowl advert in history.

[sources:fortune]