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Chrysler's 'Halftime in America' Super Bowl commercial taken down from YouTube by NFL (update: back online)

Chrysler's 'Halftime in America' Super Bowl commercial taken down from YouTube by NFL (update: back online)

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One of the undisputed winners of last night's Super Bowl commercial competition had to be Chrysler's "Halftime in America" spot, but if you're expecting to find it on Chrysler's YouTube page, you'd be mistaken — the NFL put in a copyright claim and had the video taken down from YouTube for reasons currently unknown.

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Halftime in America
Halftime in America

One of the undisputed winners of last night's Super Bowl commercial competition had to be Chrysler's "Halftime in America" spot, but if you're expecting to find it on Chrysler's YouTube page, you'd be mistaken — the NFL put in a copyright claim and had the video taken down from YouTube for reasons currently unknown. The two-minute commercial, which stars Clint Eastwood inspirationally rallying football-watching Americans to work together to rebound from a tough "first half," is clearly meant to be the centerpiece of a social media campaign, with a map of the US showing different shares of the commercial by users on Facebook and Twitter. However, for a video to go social, users need to be able to watch it; while the Facebook and Twitter connections on Chrysler's YouTube page re-post as you'd expect, it just links you back to a dead video.

It's entirely possible this was an automatic claim that will be corrected soon, but for the meantime you'll have to watch the commercial on the NFL's site (or just check out an unofficial source, like the video below). Whatever the issue is, it's almost certainly not the use of "halftime," as there are plenty of other halftime trademarks in use. We've reached out to YouTube, Chrysler, the NFL, and Widen + Kennedy (the creative agency behind the ad) for comment, and we'll update here if we find anything out on this strange takedown.

Update: The NFL's targeting unofficial sources, as well — the video below was live when this post was originally published, but has since been removed by the NFL. The video is still available on Chrysler's media site, which you can see at the bottom of this post.

Update 2: It looks like Chrysler and the NFL have worked out whatever differences they had, because "Halftime in America" is back up on the company's YouTube page (though it's still down on some third-party YouTube channels). We haven't heard anything back from any company involved in this ad, but we'll let you know if we find out the cause for this takedown.