Jeep hides ad in 'Saturday Night Live' skit, sort of

Jeep did something over the weekend that we've never seen before -- probably because we're too young. It didn't place its product in a show, which has become more and more common. “We can take my Prius, it has navigation!” And it didn't quite make a commercial spot, in the traditional sense, at least. Instead, it not only cast SNL Weekend Update host Cecily Strong in a new Jeep Cherokee ad, it also slotted the spot right at the time when Saturday Night Live usually does a spoof commercial.

Feminine products, beef jerky, a d@#k in box -- these are spoof skits we expect to see around 11:50 p.m. on Saturday. But there Strong was, riding shotgun in a Jeep Cherokee, on the run to find a costume for the night's show. We kept waiting for something funny to happen. We even rewound the stupid thing, thinking we missed something.

It's called a cast commercial. They happened more often during the early years of television when cast members of “The Adventures of Superman” or “The Andy Griffith Show” pitched for a product, sometimes in the character that they play.

The commercial features Strong and her cohort using voice-activated commands, checking out the navigation system and making calls via Bluetooth. We even thought it was shot by SNL considering the different edits and overall flow. The weekly show does such a good job on these spoofs that we've been fooled several times before.

Jeep says the commercial was the sixth in a series called “The Cherokee Effect.” Earlier spots included Sarah Hyland from “Modern Family,” Baron Davis from Esquire Network's “How I Rock It,” Kyle Richards from Bravo Media's “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” and E! News' co-anchor Terrence Jenkins. The company also says that the timing of the ad was purely coincidental.

Check out the non-spoof ad above and imagine it squeezed in between Louis C.K.'s monologue and a skit called “Black Jeopardy.” We've also listed some of the best SNL commercials of all time -- including Adobe-- here as reference material.

By Jake Lingeman