The New York Giants, the St. Louis Rams, and the Kinks. One of those three is not like the others, but they all mingled during the TV broadcast of last night's Monday Night Football game, where the above commercial played roughly a dozen times. The amazing visuals of this Toyota Prius ad -- if "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" director Michel Gondry didn't film this, someone's seriously stealing his style -- are only accentuated by the Kinks tune underneath. The track wormed its way into fans' heads even when Giants linebacker Michael Boley chucked the football at unsuspecting people while celebrating a touchdown.
So what Kinks song is it? It's not "Lola" or "You Really Got Me," the only two Kinks songs that 99 percent of music lovers can identify (and 51 percent of that 99 percent think Van Halen wrote "You Really Got Me"). The makers of the Prius ad dug deep into the Kinks' discography to find "Got to Be Free," the closing track on the band's Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part One. A pretty obscure choice since it was never released as a single, but the song does perfectly match the "People Person" ad.
Note to all those Mad Men out there: Using the Kinks results in incredible ads. Amazingly, the Prius spot is only the second best commercial to use the band's music. Here's the gold medalist, but we still have no idea how they made this one:
Listen to the full "Got to Be Free":