Feb 7, 2018 4 min read

In 1987, footwear maker Nike committed an offense that no small number of people saw as virtually sacrilegious.

It used a Beatles song in a television commercial.

And not just a Beatles song, but the group’s own recording of “Revolution.” Detractors argued that to use the band’s own rendition, made at the height of worldwide unrest in 1968, took it out of context, devalued it and turned it into another grubby tool in the salesman’s bag. Proponents argued that classical music had been used in commercials for decades and endured, that “Revolution” was a pop song and not holy writ, and people would still be able to associate it with things other than sneakers.

The fierce debate that surrounded the Nike commercial 31 years ago now seems hopelessly quaint and overblown, particularly since most recording artists now clamor to get their songs in television commercials in order to expose them to a wider audience. But even as more of our lives are shaped to the demands of commerce, there is a case to be made that there are some things that just should not commercialized, that should be granted a higher reverence.

An example: Martin Luther King Jr., and the inspirational speeches he made in the 1960s pointing out the injustices in American society, particularly when it came to African-Americans not being accorded their full rights as citizens. If anything in our national life should be kept out of the hands of admen, it’s King and his work.

However, King’s estate and the manufacturers of Dodge trucks apparently don’t see it that way. In between Morgan Freeman hawking Mountain Dew and Danny DeVito lending his voice to M&M’s in commercials that aired during the Super Bowl Sunday night, Dodge advertised its Ram trucks by using excerpts from King’s “Drum Major Instinct” speech that was given in Atlanta, coincidentally, on Feb. 4, 1968, 50 years to the day before the Super Bowl. The ad deployed King’s message about service to peddle the notion that Ram trucks are “built to serve.”

The backlash was severe. One social media wag joked that “if you don’t like MLK in a car commercial, you are going to hate the new Doritos flavor Gandhi is pushing.” On a more serious note, U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison, a Democrat from Minnesota, tweeted that “ordinarily I wouldn’t mention … Dodge Ram’s Super Bowl ad because I wouldn’t want to draw attention to it, but exploitation of Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech about servant leadership to sell trucks is a new low.”

It would be fair to say that, before an audience of millions, Dodge stepped in it. Tim Calkins, a marketing professor at Northwestern University, told The New York Times, “It’s the wrong mistake to make given everything that’s going on in the U.S. right now. There’s so much emotion right now around race in this country that this was a high-risk move, and clearly it’s not going over very well.”

Calkins added, “I think it was well-intentioned, but they’re going to have a lot of explaining to do.”

To make matters even worse, King’s “Drum Major Instinct” speech contains passages that warn about “gentlemen of massive verbal persuasion … (who) have a way of saying things to you that kind of gets you into buying” and bemoaned the fact that some people would purchase vehicles “because it’s something about this car that makes my car a little better than my neighbor’s car … I am sad to say that the nation in which we live is the supreme culprit.”

King’s children have been criticized over the years for commercializing their father’s legacy, and some of their defenders have asserted that his sons and surviving daughter deserve a payday because they lost their father at a young age, and were deprived of his presence even when he was alive because of his civil rights work. Perhaps they should be due some compensation. But, along the way, they and their representatives should exercise a little more discernment in what they lend their father’s name to, and wall it off from the “gentlemen of massive verbal persuasion.”