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For Instacart, the Super Bowl is bananas.
The delivery company wants to let potential they can give specific instructions about the attributes of the groceries they want to buy, even notes about the ripeness and brightness of the elongated fruit. But getting into such nitty gritty in a 30-second Super Bowl ad may be nearly impossible.
So Instacart, which made its Super Bowl debut last year with a standout spot featuring supermarket mascots such as the Jolly Green Giant and the Pillsbury Doughboy, hired real-life personalities instead: Ben Stiller and Benson Boone. And to direct the commercial, the company enlisted Spike Jonze. The 30-second spot will air during the first quarter of NBC’s coming February 8 telecast of Super Bowl LX.
The company was determined to make a pitch to people who aren’t using its services. “Why are people not participating in this category, even though it has so many great benefits?” asks Lauren Jones, Instacart’s chief marketing officer, during a recent interview. “And one of the key barriers is quality and control — this idea that if I go to the grocery store, I can pick out like the perfect piece of meat and the perfect banana. But if I’m not, if I’m using an app, like, how do I have that control?”
If such a conversation can’t be had in a commercial, says Jones, at least the company can try to spark it.
There will be a lot of fire in Instacart’s Big Game effort. Stiller and Boone play musicians singing a song about the delivery service and how it can deliver just the right bananas, but Stiller’s character grows frustrated that he cannot emulate the flips that Boone’s character executes so easily. Jealousy proves Stiller’s undoing. Jonze shot the commercial on vintage cameras so “it’s like you’re just discovering some tape from somewhere, you know?” asks Jones. “It’s going to seem like it’s being piped in from almost another universe.” And, quite likely, make viewers lean in to understand why the TV screen looks so different.
Like other companies seeking to market technology and services instead of hard, cold products, Instacart faces a challenge: How to explain what it does to viewers looking for celebration, humor and celebrities? While the Super Bowl often serves as the setting for mind blowing commercials from Apple or other tech giants, the simple truth is that ads that dazzle or make people think are really few and far between.
“The job of the spot is to just drive excitement and interest so that people then are interested in why we’re talking about bananas, and then go and find more information,” says Jones.
That puts a lot of the onus for success on Stiller and Boone. They get a good chance to shine in a two and a half minute longform version of the ad released Wednesday.
The pair are fully committed to their roles as offbeat singers, and they are backed by outlandishly-dressed band members as well as others dressed as an anthropomorphic watermelon or carrot. While Boone did as many as 30 flips during the ad shoot, says Jones, Stiller’s dangerous flops were really the work of stunt personnel, one of whom fell onto a foam drum kit that was constructed with the use of a 3-D printer.
The crew at the ad shoot “applauded” when the stunt was accomplished, says Jones, “because we were just like, wow, that is that was ambitious.”
So too is any Super Bowl ad. But Jones hopes the company’s strategy sets up the 30 seconds to spur consumers to spend significantly more time considering the message. “I think the ideal journey is you, check it out on YouTube, you watch the long form, you geek out a bit, and then you’re like, wait, what is this out about? And then we have SEO and SEM that’s going to help you understand about bananas.” Don’t slip!
English (US) ·