Bruce Springsteen, who is a musician, was reportedly arrested on November 14 and charged with DWI, but that news didn’t surface until today. This was highly inconvenient for Jeep, which ran a long and presumably very expensive ad featuring The Boss during the Super Bowl on Sunday. The ad is apparently in the midst of being pulled.
The ad is currently nowhere to be seen on Jeep’s YouTube account, nor is it on Jeep’s Instagram; you can find unofficial versions of it on YouTube if you go looking, or if you go to the Instagram account of Bruce himself. But it has ostensibly been pulled from official Jeep accounts. I emailed Jeep to see what the situation is and will update this post if they respond.
Which is where I will stop to note that the order of events here is a bit bizarre. Springsteen was charged with the DWI way back in November, but he didn’t shoot the Jeep ad until later, in the last few weeks, according to Ad Age. Which begs the question: Springsteen and/or his people didn’t give Jeep a heads-up about the DWI in the time in between? A bit rude, but Springsteen doesn’t really do ads so maybe he’s just out of practice.
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Also, The Boss has a pretty clean image so there’s no reason Jeep should expect for something like this to have happened, but I dunno, call me crazy, Jeep is a car brand, I would hope that some people in its marketing department might ask if the big star of its Super Bowl commercial has had any recent DWI trouble.
Either way, it’s an expensive headache for Jeep. And, to be clear, driving drunk — as it has been alleged Springsteen did — is unacceptable in any circumstance. In 2020, or 2021, you have no excuse.
