The Super Bowl is bananas for Instacart.
Delivery companies want to be able to give potential users specific instructions about the characteristics of the groceries they want to buy, even notes about the ripeness and brightness of the elongated fruit. But it may be nearly impossible to get this close to the point in a 30-second Super Bowl ad.
So Instacart made its Super Bowl debut last year with a prominent spot featuring supermarket mascots like the Jolly Green Giant and Pillsbury Doughboy, replacing them with real people named Ben Stiller and Benson Boone. The company then hired Spike Jonze to direct the commercial. The 30-second spot will air during the first quarter of Super Bowl LX, which will be broadcast on February 8th on NBC.
The company decided to market its services to people who weren’t using them. “Why aren’t people participating in this category when there are so many benefits?” asked Laura Jones, Instacart’s chief marketing officer, in a recent interview. “And one of the key barriers is quality and control. The idea that you can go to the grocery store and choose the perfect piece of meat or the perfect banana or whatever. But if that’s not the case, how can you have that control if you’re using an app?”
Jones says that even if such conversations can’t happen within commercials, the company can at least try to spark them.
Instacart’s Big Game efforts will be a blast. Stiller and Boone play musicians who sing songs about delivery services and their delivery methods, but Stiller’s character becomes frustrated with his inability to emulate the flip that Boone’s character easily performs. Jealousy proves Stiller’s undoing. Jones shot the commercial with a vintage camera, so “it’s like you found a tape somewhere, right?” Jones asks. “It’s almost going to look like it’s being piped in from another universe.” And it’s very likely to make viewers lean in to understand why their TV screens look so different.
Like other companies trying to sell technology and services instead of hard, cold products, Instacart faces challenges. It’s about how to explain what Instacart does to an audience looking for celebration, humor and celebrity. The Super Bowl is often the setting for shocking commercials from Apple and other tech giants, but the simple truth is that very few ads actually surprise or make people think.
“Spot’s job is just to build excitement and interest so that people are curious about why we’re talking about bananas and go looking for more information,” Jones says.
So Mr. Stiller and Mr. Boone have a great responsibility for success. They get a chance to shine in a two-and-a-half minute long ad released Wednesday.
The two go all-out in their roles as eccentric singers, backed by band members dressed in eccentric outfits and others dressed as anthropomorphic watermelons and carrots. Jones said Boone performed 30 flips during the ad shoot, but Stiller’s dangerous flops were actually the work of stunt staff, one of whom fell onto a 3D-printed foam drum kit.
The ad crew “claps” when the stunt is successful, Jones said.
The same goes for Super Bowl ads. But Jones wants the company’s strategy to give consumers significantly more time to think about their message, setting the 30-second time limit. “I think the ideal journey is for you to check out YouTube, watch long videos, get a little geeky, and then think, wait a second, what is this about? And then there’s SEO and SEM to help you understand bananas.” Don’t slip!
