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New Matthew McConaughey Lincoln Aviator Commercial is a Big Hit

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New Matthew McConaughey Lincoln Aviator Commercial
Photo: Lincoln Motor Company/YouTube

Lincoln Motor Company’s longstanding partnership with Academy Award-winner Matthew McConaughey continues to pay dividends. This past Friday the 13th (spooooky), the luxury brand launched a new commercial for the 2020 Lincoln Aviator starring McConaughey. As of Tuesday afternoon, the video is up to nearly 22.5 million views on YouTube, surpassing the total number of lifetime YouTube views for McConaughey’s last two Lincoln commercials — “Ultimate Control” and “Uncharted Waters ”— combined.

The new commercial finds McConaughey piloting a 2020 Lincoln Aviator through a seemingly impenetrable miasma of pink and purple smoke. Somewhere in the miasma a tricked-out sports sedan with a tall rear spoiler is doing donuts and growling like a beast in The Mist, but the man at the wheel of the Lincoln seems unimpressed. He notes that there are many flavors of performance, including “the amped-up-over-tuned-feeding-frenzy-of-sheet-metal kind” and the kind that Lincoln’s about: “performance that just leaves you feeling better as a result.”


Lincoln’s Latest: The new 2020 Lincoln Aviator embodies the idea of Quiet Flight


Watch: New Matthew McConaughey Lincoln Aviator Commercial

The ad features an original score from the Detroit Symphony Orchestra — who performed the unique chimes that play in the vehicle in place of conventional bleeps and beeps. It’s directed by Johan Renck, who most recently directed the multi-Emmy-nominated HBO series Chernobyl. Fittingly, Lincoln also announced that it will be the exclusive luxury automotive sponsor of the 71st annual Emmy Awards broadcast on Fox this coming Sept. 22.

Lincoln also notes that the spot is the first time that one of the ads have placed McConaughey “in a setting more surreal than realistic,” which could very well mean that we’re one step closer to just letting him go full Rust Cohle in a commercial for the Lincoln Corsair. (“Time is a flat Lincoln Corsair,” perhaps?)

“We’ve created this upfront scene that isn’t exactly real,” said Jon Pearce, global chief creative officer of Hudson Rouge, who produced the spot. “It’s picturesque, it’s based in reality, but it represents this fray — a feeding frenzy of other brands’ obsessive focus on just performance. You can see these anonymous cars in the smoke — if you look closely, you can even see a bit of a shark fin — alluding to the excesses with the glimpses you see, but it’s reflecting a truthful observation.”

If McConaughey read that, he’d probably break out his bongo again.

You can expect to see the new Matthew McConaughey Lincoln Aviator commercial all up in your TV over the next several months.


How Does It Compare? Looking at the 2020 Lincoln Aviator side-by-side with the new Cadillac XT6