84 Lumber’s Super Bowl ad featuring a ‘wall’ is rejected as too political
More than two weeks before the game, 84 Lumber’s Super Bowl commercial has already created buzz.
Ad Age reports that Fox Sports, which will broadcast the game on Feb. 5, rejected the company’s first proposal because it was too controversial.
The 90-second ad included a depiction of a border wall that the network believed would conjure comparison to the controversial Trump-proposed barrier between the United States and Mexico, according to the agency that created the commercial.
“Fox rejected our original commercial because they determined that some of the imagery, including ‘the wall,’ would be too controversial,” Michael Brunner, CEO of the Pittsburgh-based ad agency, told Ad Age. “So we went back and revised the spot to make it acceptable to them.”
Fox did not return media calls for comment.
According to Campaign US, which covers the advertising industry, the spot focused on the family-owned Pennsylvania lumber company’s recruitment efforts and featured images of immigrants unable to enter the country because of a wall.
“84 Lumber challenged us to create a thought-provoking, 90-second spot that would tell the world who 84 Lumber is and what they stand for — a company looking for people with grit, determination and heart, no matter who they are, where they come from or what they look like,” Brunner told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Brunner told Ad Age that while the “full story will no longer be told on TV at the Super Bowl, we all believe too strongly in that message to leave it on the editing room floor.”
So the rejected ad will debut online on Super Bowl Sunday on 84 Lumber’s website. The tweaked version is set to run just before halftime.
The Super Bowl spot “is the launch pad into our recruitment campaign,” the lumber company’s marketing director, Amy Smiley, told Campaign in a statement.
“We definitely are open to all walks of life. We want people to be aware of who we are and come to our website. We’ve got a great story to tell about our company in our 90 seconds and are exploring many different ways to do that.”
This story was originally published January 19, 2017 at 2:42 PM with the headline "84 Lumber’s Super Bowl ad featuring a ‘wall’ is rejected as too political."