The Richards Group introduces the new Jeep Renegade with a 60-second spot, straightforwardly titled “Renegades.”
The broadcast spot, which launches today, was built around the song “Renegades,” the new single by Interscope Records’ X Ambassadors, which was chosen in collaboration with the label as the foundation for the campaign. As it turned out, X Ambassadors were working with Alex Da Kid on a song that fit the bill.
“Through this unprecedented collaboration with KIDinaKORNER/Interscope Records, X Ambassadors and Alex Da Kid to build a campaign around an original song, we’re staking a new claim to music and setting the stage for the Jeep brand’s North America marketing launch for the all-new 2015 Jeep Renegade,” said Olivier Francois, Chief Marketing Officer, FCA – Global, in a statement.
“Olivier came forward and challenged us to deliver a song for him that had the theme and the spirit of the new Jeep launch,” Steve Berman, vice chairman of A&M Records, told Adweek. “Sometimes you just get lucky in the timing of how things works. [‘Renegades’] was a piece of art they [X Ambassadors] were already recording.”
While the process of the song selection and its integration as a fundamental building block of the campaign may mark new ground, it’s certainly not the first time Jeep have built a campaign around a song. Last May, the brand released a spot from GlobalHue built around the posthumous Michael Jackson single “Love Never Felt So Good.” The new spot feels even more like a music video than that effort did, complete with text referencing the artist and song title at the beginning of the ad. Shots of the band are interspersed with shots of the new Jeep Renegade and footage of millenials (hello, target audience) doing renegade-y stuff like hopping fences, nightswimming (on what appears to be a quiet night) and skateboarding.
“If you look at the words of this song, if I had given an agency that brief, they would not have cracked a better script than X Ambassadors did,” Francois told Adweek. “The script of the song is totally on brief, it’s spot on…But what really made me feel that [the song] was the campaign was the way they speak of the millennials being the modern renegades. The genius here is that you tie the name of the car, which is ‘Renegade’ to the mindset of the target, which is the millennial target.”