2019 Ram 1500 Breaks the Internet With Patriotic, Cross-Cultural “Thank God I’m a Country Boy” Ad

The takeaway: Urban or rural, there’s a place in your life for FCA’s giant pickup truck.

byWill Sabel Courtney|
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Fiat Chrysler may be the lesser of the Big Three for the last decade, but it's not for lack of some dynamite advertising. The chill-inducing Eminem commercial that was ostensibly a salute to Detroit's never-say-die spirit (but was actually for the forgettable Chrysler 200), Clint Eastwood's locker-room halftime speech to the nation, Ram's two-minute paean to the American farmer—FCA's ad game has consistently been a step above Ford and General Motors in recent years. 

But while as those three ads all dropped during the Super Bowl, it seems FCA isn't waiting around until February 4th to start extolling the virtues of the all-new 2019 Ram 1500. Instead, the carmaker dropped its first commercial for the new full-sized, tech-packed pickup on January 15th—the same day the new Ram made its triumphant debut at the 2018 Detroit Auto Show. 

The commercial, entitled "Thank God I'm a Country Boy," is exactly the sort of heart-warming, patriotic, multicultural celebration of America you'd expect from a modern company looking to move more than half a million vehicles a year by playing on the viewers' love of country. The ad intersperses glimpses of 21st Century urban life—there's more than a few establishing shots of New York City that are familiar to us at The Drive—with the more pickup truck ad-typical imagery of farmers hard at work, all set to a cover of John Denver's eponymous sound performed by a group called The Tennessee Kids, who we'd never heard of prior to today. (Turns out they're apparently Justin Timberlake's backing band.) It may seem a bit generic in principle, but the point seems clear: No matter where you're from, what you do, or how you live your life, the 2019 Ram 1500 is the truck for you. 

And the ad seems to have stuck the landing, if the statistics are anything to believe. The video had racked up more than six million views on YouTube as of Wednesday morning—two days after it went live—and was piling up more than 130,000 views ever hour on the official Ram Facebook page. Clearly, the American public loves wholesome appeals to heart-felt modern-day patriotism as much as they love their trucks...and man, do they love their trucks. 

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