Who is 84 Lumber and Where Do I Go to Get Some 2x4s?

I learned early on in my Advertising career that if you want to make a powerful emotional connection go with the big themes. Freedom. Love. Journey.

Every year we ad people debate ad nauseam how well our colleagues have accomplished that sort of thing with the ads run during the Super Bowl football championship. The stakes are high. The going rate for a 30-second spot on this year’s game was a cool five million.

My pick for the best of this year’s Super Bowl work took the idea of journey and turned it into an American odyssey. It had everyone at my small Super Bowl party asking the same question. Who the hell is 84 Lumber?

Maybe you’ve seen the ad, if not while you were watching the game then on the morning news. It follows the journey of a young girl and her mother north out of Mexico. They brave deserts, coyotes and rushing rivers. Even hop a speeding freight train.

And there, if the Fox network had its way, the story would have ended. Fox refused to air the commercial’s original ending in which the plucky travelers are finally stopped by a giant wall. The network found it uncomfortably controversial.

The Super Bowl audience was instead left with a scene of the mother and daughter sitting by a campfire in the middle of nowhere. We were invited to go on-line and see the story’s conclusion at the 84 Lumber website.

The 90 seconds that aired on the Super Bowl did a good job of luring viewers to the site. The film is beautiful. There’s a nice subplot of the daughter collecting small scraps of cloth and paper as she follows her mother north. A careful watcher will notice her stitching the bits and pieces together as they sit by the campfire. We’re left to wonder about her intent.

For me there was an even larger curiosity. How does a company I’ve never heard of come up with fifteen million dollars to run a Super Bowl commercial with no ending?

In the New York Times the morning after the big game Professor Tim Calkins of Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, who I know to be a smart man and an expert on the yearly Super Bowl ad derby, talked about the need for advertisers to be careful in our polarized political environment. There’s a big risk of annoying people who are mainly looking for a little escapist entertainment. “It is safest to stick to the product and stick to lighthearted humor,” he advised. And yet here was a relatively small and unknown company betting the farm on exactly the opposite strategy.

That’s why I liked it.

I couldn’t get to the on-line ending the first time I tried. The incoming traffic had crashed the website.

The site was back up by game’s end, and showed the mother and daughter coming up against the wall. The mother stares in disbelief at the forbidding expanse of concrete. The daughter opens her backpack and pulls out her project. A tattered American flag made out of the scraps of paper and cloth she’s picked up along the way. The litter flag is the physical embodiment of the lines from the Emma Lazarus poem engraved on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty:

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.”

The ad could end right there and leave a giant hole torn in our hearts. But it doesn’t. As the mother hugs her little girl she spots a shaft of light. It’s coming through the crack in a massive wooden doorway, built into the wall by a mysterious group of workers who drive away in pick-up trucks as the travelers approach. I assume they used construction materials from 84 Lumber. It’s impossible to miss the symbolism of warm wood played against the cold mass of a concrete wall.

Journey was a big theme in this year’s Super Bowl ads. The commercial that did best in ad-o-meter type surveys was even titled “Hero’s Journey” and starred Melissa McCarthy as a slapstick eco warrior. Anheuser-Bush ran an ad chronicling the 19th century immigrant journey of founder Adolphus Busch. You can almost feel the pull of a strong undercurrent working its way through our culture. One that says we want to be in a different place from where we all landed after the dreadful political year of 2016.

Here is what else I’ve learned. 84 Lumber is a Pennsylvania based supplier of building materials. Their website indicates that my local store is in Gurnee IL, a six-hour drive from my home in Minneapolis. A long way to go for some 2x4s, yet something about the brand instantly created by 90 seconds on the Super Bowl and a trip to their website to view the emotional conclusion almost compels me to make the journey.

The company’s owner, Maggie Hardy Magerko, has been in the media saying the ad shouldn’t be controversial, it’s a recruitment message about universal values like hard work, dedication and sacrifice. She actually supports the president and his idea of building a border wall. The rabbit hole we’ve gone down as a nation gets curiouser and curiouser.

I take my lessons from the film itself, and the way it’s playing in the world. We live and work in one of those fulcrum moments of history. Even if you follow the good professor’s advice and don’t want to take a stand with your advertising, you run the risk of getting assigned one anyway. So hazard the big things that will make people remember you. Take them on a journey, and along the way tell your story with humanity and compassion. Remember that a doorway and bright light will always take your brand further than a wall and darkness.