DonDiego encourages free speech, and has no problem with the "ad". He happened to watch it live, . . . and couldn't understand what exactly it was advertising and to whom, . . . and opined they'd just spent a lot of money for nothing.
But, in fact, they did get a lot of attention; how that translates to profits (from increased business) or losses (from disgruntled customers) DonDiego cannot know.
There's lots of "backstory" to the ad.
F'rinstance:
"In the 90-second spot for the construction-materials company, a Latino mother and daughter who are apparently sneaking across the southern border of the U.S. rise in the dark, walk along a barbed-wire fence, clamber aboard the boxcar of a moving train and wade across a river.
In the full-length, six-minute version, which the company said was rejected by Fox for being too political, the mother and daughter are despondent when they encounter an enormous wall in the desert. Then the little girl presents the mom with a crude American flag she has assembled from scraps of plastic bags, and the pair discover a gigantic set of doors in the wall. They proceed to stroll right through."
Ref: New York Post
The interested reader, if any, can link to the 6-minute version at this NY Post website.
And this:
"This was [84 Lumber's] first Super Bowl commercial. And, according to the New York Times (paywall), it was meant to recruit 20-somethings to work for the company, which like others in the construction business is experiencing a labor shortage.
But none of that came across in the ad, which in many respects was an abject failure. Ad-scoring firm Ace Metrix said the ad that aired on TV was one of the lowest-performing Super Bowl ads it has ever tested, in part because it was too serious for the Super Bowl. (This is Ace Metrix’s seventh year analyzing the Super Bowl.) And the Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management’s annual ad review gave the ad a D. The Ad Review’s co-lead Tim Calkins called it 'one of the strangest approaches I’ve see to a Super Bowl ad in a long time.' ”
Ref: Quartz Media
***EDITED TO ADD***
DonDiego recognizes this "issue" is really not a free-speech matter. There is no requirement that a TV network must accept a submitted commercial. Hence, the word: "commercial".
