Matthew McConaughey gazes out toward the galaxy before him, pondering its possibilities.
“Space. The boundary of human achievement. The new frontier,” the actor begins in a new Salesforce ad that initially appears to be a callback to his role in “Interstellar.”
Then, he makes a noise of indifference and decides to steer his aircraft — a hot air balloon — back to Earth. As it floats over the San Francisco skyline, he considers a laundry list of other ideas.
“It’s not time to escape. It’s time to engage. It’s time to plant more trees. It’s time to build more trust. It’s time to build more space for all of us,” says McConaughey, the company’s new brand partner and adviser, to confused street-level passersby in the Financial District. “While the others look to the metaverse and Mars, let’s stay here and restore ours.”
You might have seen the minutelong spot during the Winter Olympics over the weekend, and it’s slated to air again at the Super Bowl on Feb. 13, unveiling Salesforce’s #TeamEarth campaign, which aims to address the company’s commitment to fighting climate change through growing 1 trillion trees by 2030 and achieving near-zero carbon emissions by 2040, among other goals.
But the commercial also reads as a bit of a tongue-in-cheek response to Facebook’s proposed virtual reality platform and the billionaire space race helmed by British business magnate Richard Branson, former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Tesla founder and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who announced plans in 2020 to sell all of his houses to fund a colony on Mars.
“The new frontier … it ain’t rocket science,” McConaughey says in the ad. “It’s right here.”
Another press release shared by Salesforce on Thursday appeared to have a similar, albeit more pointed, message:
“Lately, it seems some folks have their head in the stars, fascinated with the metaverse and Mars,” it read. “At Salesforce, our business is more grounded, and we believe we can defy gravity without ever leaving the planet.”
Watch the video below:
