A great little “commercial” from the folks at Next City that poignantly illustrates the value of good transit to everyday peoples lives.

Next City made the above video in response to the Dodge Ram superbowl commercial, which the felt conflated car ownership with good old fashioned hard working salt of the earth types. Presumably they took exception to the connotation that you can’t be an honest and productive human without a new Dodge in the garage!

This is what the creator, Diana Lind, had to say:

I can’t deny that the “God Made a Farmer” Super Bowl ad for Dodge RAM trucks was beautiful. The imagery was Americana at its finest. Paul Harvey’s voice, which animated the pictures, in and of itself stunned me. Like other ads that have come out of the Chrysler car company, it put a lump in my throat.

And yet the ad, like the one about soldiers for Jeep, conflated the merits of people with those of cars. Which seems a bit sad for 2013, when in the past six months climate change has reared its ugly head and begged us to change our consumption economy for something a bit more sustainable. And the nostalgic imagery — as if we only believe in farmers and soldiers to represent the best of humanity, and as if buying a car is a noble act — started to offend me.

So I thought I’d try making my own video in response. Keep in mind it’s my first foray into creating a video and I didn’t have much time to do this (between my own job and my own transit riding). But I hope it strikes a chord for anyone else who felt that transit and the people who ride it got short shrift from the Super Bowl ads.

You can view the original car commercial here:

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5 comments

  1. Dodge – absolutely the wrong brand to associate with heartland USA. Should have been Massey Ferguson or John Deere. Expect response ads in due course from MF and JD. You can’t be an honest and productive farmer without a proper tractor in the shed.

  2. That Dodge Ad reminded me of those SUV drivers that drive around with some glib slogan on the back of the spare tire cover that goes something like “XXXXX (the SUV maker) loves Nature” – and by extension, the driver of said SUV does too.

    Yeah, they might well love nature, so much in fact, that they often drive right over the top of it – ruining it as they go,

    And I’m sure those US farmers, who no doubt think that god created their mono-culture, GM modified crops, their farm subsidies, also think that he created agricultural chemical run offs, water way eutrophication and serious water depletion too as well to show how much god loves a farmer?

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