Chrysler Chief Marketing Officer Olivier Francois said one of the pickups was the reason he was able to get ''Lose Yourself'' and the Detroit-bred rapper for the two-minute 2011 Super Bowl ad.
DETROIT, MI- A Ram pickup truck played a role in landing Eminem for the critically-acclaimed “Born on Fire” Super Bowl ad, one Chrysler executive said Monday.
Chrysler Chief Marketing Officer Olivier Francois said one of the pickups was the reason he was able to get “Lose Yourself” and the Detroit-bred rapper for the two-minute 2011 Super Bowl ad.
Francois said he was driving one of the vehicles through a snowstorm in mid-December – less than two months before the Super Bowl – in a “hopeless” attempt to contact someone who could connect him to Eminem.
“It was my last attempt,” he told reporters Monday during an event in Detroit to discuss new ad campaigns for the Ram 1500. “If it wasn’t for the truck, I tell you, we would have had some other artist.”
Francois said the Auburn Hills-based automaker was having trouble contacting Eminem about using the music because the rapper never allowed it for commercial use.
“I was really feeling very, very hopeless,” he said. “I normally never surrender, but I was this close to surrendering … I could not even get to him.”
Through the grapevine, Francois had heard that Joel Martin, who handles Eminem’s publishing rights and has one-third of the writing credit on the song, sometimes stays in a studio in Ferndale late at night working. So ,leaving the company’s Auburn Hills headquarters around 10 p.m. in mid-December, Francois ventured to Ferndale in search of the studio and Martin.
“The same commercial without his music, not to say without him, would not have been the same thing,” he said, adding there’s no way he would have made it to the studio with any “normal car.”
Francois, who was still new to Metro Detroit, said Eminem was not at the studio that night, but the meeting with Martin went well enough that Chrysler was not only allowed to use the music, but Eminem would appear in the commercial.
“Thanks to that night, everything happened,” he said.
The “Born on Fire” commercial featured Eminem driving through downtown Detroit to the riff from his Academy Award winning track “Lose Yourself,” as a voice over talks about Detroit going to “Hell and back.”
The ad, which has received international recognition, debuted the automaker’s highly-successful “Imported from Detroit” tagline.
“This is the Motor City and this is what we do,” Eminem said during the ad for the Chrysler 200.
In May 2011, Chrysler gave the commercial credit for helping post a $116 million profit in the first three months of the year, compared to a $197 million net loss the same time period in 2010.
The “Imported from Detroit” national advertising campaign was created in partnership with Wieden+Kennedy of Portland, Ore.
The original commercial has more than 15 million hits on YouTube.