A lumber company’s Super Bowl ad, which featured an immigration theme, was edited for air due to its political message, an executive from the ad agency behind the spot told TPM.
The ad, “The Journey Begins,” depicts a mother and daughter on what appears to be their journey to the U.S.-Mexico border. While the original edit concluded with the pair encountering a massive, concrete border wall, Fox asked the company to edit the ending into something more ambiguous, according to executives from 84 Lumber and the agency behind the ad.
Jeff Maggs, the chief client officer on the 84 Lumber account at Brunner, the advertising agency behind the ad, told TPM on Monday that Fox expressed concern over “what they called the politically charged nature of the spot.”
“They asked us to revise it,” he said.
“Obviously, the wall is what concerned them,” he continued. “Although we didn’t create a discussion about the wall, that happened well beyond us, that was something that was concerning to them.”
Amy Smiley, 84 Lumber’s director of marketing, told the Washington Post on Sunday that current events, especially President Donald Trump’s proposed border wall, had influenced the original ad’s eventual rejection.
“[T]he conversation in the media exploded around this topic, and it evolved into something controversial that made Fox a little too uncomfortable,” she told the Post.
Maggs said that while the ad wasn’t meant to show support for illegal immigration — “couldn’t be further from the truth,” he said — the response to the commercial had been “mixed.”
“Very much like the country,” he said.
Representatives for Fox declined TPM’s request for comment on this story.
84 Lumber wasn’t the only company to err on the political side with their Super Bowl ads: One Budweiser spot told the story of Adolphus Busch, a German immigrant with a prized beer recipe who faced discrimination when he came to America.
And Coca-Cola re-used an ad from 2014, featuring “America the Beautiful” sung in multiple languages.
See 84 Lumber’s edited Super Bowl ad below, followed by the full-length version, via the Washington Post: