Instacart’s Super Bowl commercial gets by with a little help from some friends.
To stand out during Fox’s February 9 telecast of Super Bowl LIX, executives from the delivery service reached out to some of the nation’s biggest consumer-products companies, all of which happen to depend on Instacart to get everything from deodorant to frozen food on to the shelves and into the refrigerators of their customers, for the rights to use some of their best-known Madison Avenue mascots. As such, Instacart’s commercial stands on the shoulders of grocery-aisle giants like Procter & Gamble, General Mills, PepsiCo, Kraft Heinz Co., B&G Foods, and Energizer Holdings.
Coming along for the 30-second ride are Cheetos’ Chester Cheetah; Mountain Dew’s PuppyMonkeyBaby; the Kool-Aid Man; Old Spice’s The Man Your Man Could Smell Like; the Green Giant; the Energizer Bunny; and Mr. Clean, among others. Larry, the Quaker Oats Man, turns up in a minute-long “Director’s Cut.”
“I hope it doesn’t feel like a Super Bowl commercial you have seen a thousand times,’ says Laura Jones, Instacart’s chief marketing officer, during a recent interview.
Yet in taking on such a tactic, Instacart likely added reams of extra tasks to the creation of its Super Bowl work, a process that is already high stakes and pressure cooked. “I can’t imagine the kind of work that went into that, or the hours,” says Tim Calkins, a marketing professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. “With so many of these characters, you have to wade through all of the guidelines on each one.”
Over the years, Super Bowl advertisers have enlisted celebrities such as Charlie Sheen, Paris Hilton and Pete Davidson. But the Pillsbury Doughboy, who also appears in the Instacart spot, is probably even more challenging.
None of the characters works for free. Instacart must pay licensing fees for each of the playful figures, according to people familiar with the matter. Executives from all the other companies had a say in the final script. Even after forking over some cash, however, there are still limits to what Instacart can expect. Most of these famous mascots come with a set of rules about how they can be depicted or what they can say. Some must remain speechless other than uttering a popular catchphrase. Some can’t be shown as being any bigger than a few inches.
And there are other worries. Because of the sheer number of companies and products involved, Fox had to be very careful about where it situated the commercial within the broadcast. TV advertising, after all, still has rules. TV networks aren’t supposed to put two commercials in the same break from rivals. By enlisting Old Spice, Pillsbury and others, Instacart is showcasing a wide host of products that have an even wider array of rivals. The company had to agree that Fox could move the commercial elsewhere in the game if forced to accommodate an ad from a rival product in last-minute wrangling. “It was like a puzzle,” says Jones.
Fox has sought anywhere from over $7 million to more than $8 million for a 30-second spot in the 2025 spectacular. Add to that the costs of special effects, social-media marketing and other promotional necessities, and most of the advertisers are likely to spend at least $10 million.
Higher costs lead to a lower tolerance for guesswork. Still, Jones said she wanted to stay away from the usual formula of enlisting a celebrity to make a cameo. Famous faces “do a great job of grabbing attention if you think of the right ones,” she says. “There are also challenges associated with that, including hefty price tags, and the risk that the spot becomes more about the celebrity than the brand itself.”
Procter, General Mills and the others have reason to get into the Instacart basket. They are all eager to be depicted as essential to a family grocery list. Besides, imagine getting paid to turn up in a Super Bowl commercial! “I think they all really thought about the value we were providing them,” says Jones. “Some of these brands have their own Super Bowl ads, but some of them don’t, and some haven’t been even on television in decades. I think for them it felt like a real like grow-the-pie moment.”
Others have used the technique, sometimes known in the industry as “tagging.” In 2020, Mr. Clean, Kool-Aid Man and the Oscar Meyer Wienermobile were spotted attending the Super Bowl ad funeral of Mr. Peanut. In 2003, Target ran a commercial for a grocery-store concept that featured 17 different ad characters, ranging from the Gorton Fisherman to Tony the Tiger to the four-fingered hand character who backs Hamburger Helper. Over the years, the Pillsbury Doughboy — his name is Poppin’ Fresh — has appeared in ads for Sprint, while the Maytag Repairman made a cameo in a spot for Chevrolet and the Taco Bell Chihuahua had a guest-star role in a pitch from Geico.
Instacart’s commercial has the feel of a small movie. “Release the hounds,” says Chester Cheetah into a small mobile device at its start, and, suddenly, Heinz wiener-dogs and the Green Giant are cavorting over terrain. Mr. Clean is spotted dashing down a street, inspired by Tom Cruise from “Mission: Impossible.” Instacart was advised to listen to Isaiah Mustafa, the actor who has portrayed the Old Spice character since its inception. She was told by Procter & Gamble brand executives that the actor on set “might have feedback and you should just take it, just kind of let him drive, because we all trust him so much,” says Jones. “And he had so many good ideas, and he did give us feedback and it did kind of change a bit based on his deep knowledge of his character.”
Eventually, the assemblage convenes on the front porch of a residence, and all the figures end up as groceries in two big bags left for a family.
The commercial characters are doing more for Instacart than a short appearance in an ad. In the days leading up to the Super Bowl, some of them are making deliveries in key cities — think New Orleans, where the Big Game is being held, and Philadelphia and Kansas City, the home cities of the two teams fighting for the NFL championship. Some of the mascots appeared in sponsored content on ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” attending a party with Guillermo. On Monday, some surfaced on NBC’s “Today” in the show’s outdoor plaza, while one turned up on “Jenna & Friends” during a segment about snacks to eat while watching the event.
Phew! Putting the campaign together “was no small task, I’ll say that. And one of the CMOs was like, ‘I’ve done a lot of these, and I don’t envy what you’re about to walk into with the idea you have,” says Jones “And, yeah, that was right.”
