Even if you were glued to the TV from pregame coverage to MVP Kenneth Walker holding up the Super Bowl LX trophy for the Seahawks, you probably missed the most shocking Big Game commercial. That’s because it never actually aired.
Jeep’s commercial “Billy Goes to the River,” which is labeled as a “Big Game Ad” on YouTube, was never meant to be shown during the telecast. When the spot was released online on Feb. 4, Olivier Francois, the global chief marketing officer for Jeep’s parent company Stellantis, said, “If there were a prize for ‘the best Big Game commercial that’s not in the Big Game,’ this is the ad we’d submit.”
The reason the automaker kept it out of the Super Bowl commercial lineup? Not simply because it rivals Skittles for its insanity, though unlike Skittles’ Elijah Wood-starring two-parter, you have to wait until 60 seconds in for things to take a bizarre turn (R.I.P. Big Mouth Billy Bass). And not simply for the ginormous price tag involved with scoring a Big Game ad (Jeep was looking at an $8 million bill were they to pull the trigger).
Jeep’s decision to abstain boils down to the company having bigger fish to fry. The automaker is currently staging a major comeback effort after years of declining sales, and they don’t believe that one single Super Bowl ad, or even two or three, would be able to encompass the massive reset the automaker is focused on this year.
After bringing in new CEO Bob Broderdorf a year ago and notching its first annual sales increase in 2025 after six straight years of shrinking sales, Jeep is hitting the ground running in 2026 by launching a raft of new and updated models and setting its sights on selling one million vehicles a year in the U.S. this decade, a figure it came close to in 2018 with 973,000 units before steadily dropping off to 588,000 annual sales by 2024.
“That’s a lot of messaging and a lot of moving pieces to wrap around one 60- or 120-second spot,” Broderdorf said during a news conference last month.
Instead, Jeep decided to feature one of their most important launches of the year in an “AI-forward” ad that will live on social media. “Billy Goes to the River” sees a father and son drive an animatronic Big Mouth Billy Bass to a river to release it into the wild, by way of a 2026 Jeep Cherokee Hybrid, which returns this year after the midsize SUV was discontinued in 2023.
Once again, Jeep tapped director Jim Jenkins for the ad, after he helmed their 2020 Big Game spot featuring Bill Murray in a Groundhog Day homage. But in a modern move, the automaker is continuing its reliance on AI-generated commercials, with the bear and eagle being created using artificial intelligence.
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The Puerto Rican superstar’s set featured thousands of pyrotechnics, hundreds of dancers and an important messageBeyond the relaunched Cherokee, which should be arriving at your local dealership any day now and slots in on the affordable end of the Jeep lineup with a starting price of $36,995, the automaker is launching a Wrangler-esque electric vehicle, the $65,000 Recon, this spring, and refreshing the Grand Cherokee SUV with a new turbocharged 2.0-liter four-cylinder engine known as the Hurricane 4.
Jeep has a lot more work to do to convince buyers to come back into the fold beyond releasing new products. Even though it has some heritage to lean on this year as it celebrates the 85th anniversary of the first Jeep, built for use in WWII, the automaker has garnered a reputation for poor reliability and quality issues it needs to overcome (Consumer Reports recently ranked it 24 out of 26 among major brands in their annual new car reliability index). Then there’s the added pressure of global parent company Stellantis leaning heavily on Jeep’s success as it faces a massive “reset” of its business after major losses tied to slower-than-expected growth in the EV segment.
So did sacrificing a Big Mouth Billy Bass to the tune of Al Green’s “Take Me to the River” usher in good luck for the coming year? If view counts count for anything, apparently so. At the time of writing, Jeep’s ad has 11 million views and counting on the company’s YouTube channel, compared to around 100,000 for one commercial from Volkswagen and two from Toyota that actually aired during Sunday night’s game.
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