How Instacart and TBWA\Chiat\Day drafted brand mascots like Kool-Aid Man for the brand’s first Big Game ad

There were more than 60 famous faces in 57 ads during Super Bowl LIX in February, according to YouGov.

Stars like Matthew McConaughey, David Beckham and Kevin Hart can make instant connections with viewers — and help brands make the most of their $8 million investment for 30 seconds of airtime.

But when delivery platform Instacart decided it wanted to join the fray for its first Super Bowl ad in the summer of 2024, it turned to ad agency TBWA\Chiat\Day, which is perhaps best known as the creative firm behind Apple’s iconic 1984 ad, which introduced the Macintosh computer to Super Bowl viewers more than 40 years ago.

The result was “We're Here,” a 30-second spot that united celebrities of a different kind: brand mascots on a mission to deliver groceries for one family. The spot landed at No. 13 on USA Today’s Ad Meter ranking of all in-game ads.

Instacart’s goal was to show viewers it is more than a delivery platform by using mascots instead of human celebrities to lean in to viewer nostalgia.

In a recent discussion, Kirsten Rutherford, executive creative director at TBWA\Chiat\Day, and Taylor Erin, executive creative director at Instacart, discussed how they brought 12 mascots together for Instacart’s Super Bowl debut — including how and why one famous mascot was replaced by a cow in the final cut. They also discussed other challenges they faced and how the ad continues to live on after the Big Game.

Kirsten Rutherford: What was the brief for Instacart’s first Super Bowl ad?

Taylor Erin: We had just changed our brand strategy. We didn’t want to show up as just a delivery company. We want to truly be a care company. And we wanted to express that boldly on the Super Bowl stage.

Rutherford: Together, we landed on the thing that felt the best for the brand and that was using mascots as celebrities. In the Super Bowl, we have celebrities everywhere. So our disruptive moment is to tell a story of care through these mascots as our celebrities.

Erin: That also unlocked this new facet of our brand of nostalgia because nostalgia truly is an act of care, because what you’re doing is helping people recall a memory and all of those mascots really did just that.

Rutherford: That takes me to the next question about weighing nostalgia against the humor of the mascot idea?

Erin: Instacart as a brand is probably on the more innocent side with humor, and these mascots are as well. So we were trying to figure out how can we be funny in the right way? You helped land that humor in a really great way and a lot of it was through physical humor, like Mr. Clean running Mission: Impossible.

Rutherford: Tom Cruise on top of the building.

Erin: And Kool-Aid Man breaking through a wall. That stuff was always funny, and it’s still funny.

Rutherford: The heart of the story is an act of care. It’s a family that is making breakfast. They need groceries, and it’s an Avengers-style collective of these mascots who deliver them. Everyone from the Jolly Green Giant through to Puppy Monkey Baby, the Kool-Aid Man and Energizer Bunnies. There’s nostalgia up the wazoo, but these folks are at this heart of the story delivering something so a family can spend quality time together.

Erin: That end moment was so important to really show the why of Instacart and to make sure that, even though humbly, Instacart was the star at the end. Together, we figured out how to articulate that in an emotionally relevant way.

Rutherford: If any other brand was seen as the owner of the ad at the end of the spot, we wouldn’t have done our jobs properly.

Erin: Exactly.

Rutherford: Only Instacart has the ability to bring all of these brands together. And when we think about how people shop, they have a bunch of different brands inside their grocery cart. So being able to put them all in the same space to tell the story made so much sense.

Rutherford: What were the challenges we had?

Erin: We had to navigate the guidelines of all of these mascots that have their own unique personas and history and teams. But they were all in it with us and really excited to put their mascots — some haven’t been on the stage for a long time — back into the spotlight. And that unlocked a new brand behavior for Instacart, which is any time a mascot is anywhere now, we can really jump into that conversation. Now, even though these mascots are not part of our brand, they kind of are because we bring them to people.

Rutherford: We were the No. 1 first-time [Super Bowl] advertiser, shortlisted at Cannes, and AARP voted us No. 1. I think there’s absolute joy in having all of these brands that appeal to different generations, whether it was the Jolly Green Giant and Pillsbury Doughboy appealing to perhaps older generations, [or] folks like myself, the Gen Xers or the millennials, were absolutely loving the Kool-Aid Man. And then [Mountain Dew’s] Puppy Monkey Baby, loved by not only millennials, but Gen Z as well.

Erin: Puppy Monkey Baby was one of those things that reminded me why we brought you guys to the table with us because we needed to figure out how to express our brand on this stage in a way that is provocative and that really gets people talking. And Puppy Monkey Baby is a polarizing character.

Rutherford: Sure is.

Erin: There was a lot of debate. I was always a fan of including Puppy Monkey Baby. He’s not a very appetizing character, but he is beloved by many niche audiences.

Rutherford: There were some moments where we had to take a leap of faith creatively. They wanted to make sure there wasn’t a sea of logos in the spot, so that’s why you see these characters instead. We had nine brands in one 30-second spot. We had a dozen brands in our extended version.

Erin: Another challenge was we didn’t know exactly what brands were going to make it into the spot. And the script was dependent on what brands were in the spot. So we had this evolving script as we figured out which brands are going to appear in this ad and how they’re willing to be shown and how we wanted them to be shown. We needed to have this radically collaborative relationship. Somebody I worked really close with was Bert Marissen, group creative director at TBWA\Chiat\Day.

Rutherford: Your partner in crime.

Erin: We were on a texting basis, which I believe is key to any great in-house external agency partnership. When there was news, he was the first to know, and then we would bring our teams together.

Rutherford: Your Instacart team was so kind to fly down to see us. There were so many aspects of this campaign, to be able to stick them up on a wall the old-fashioned way rather than do it virtually was fantastic because things would be moved around. We could make those split decisions at game time and work together. And so that was a really important part.

Erin: It was such a fast-moving creative process. I remember rewriting our teaser video the day before we shot it, thinking, “These are the messages we need to land. How are we going to do it?” And it wouldn’t have been possible if we weren’t all in the same room, really jamming together and having that radical trust in each other.

Rutherford: One of my favorite moments was a high-stress moment, but it worked out so well. We had a particular mascot at the end of the spot, but we weren’t able to add this mascot because of network limitations. Your team had this lovely solve of bringing in an unofficial mascot. And the unofficial mascot of milk is a cow, obviously.

Erin: Instacart was on a Zoom call, and we were like, “We need another mascot, but we can’t have another mascot.” And then Jess Guy, the creative director of Instacart, was like, “What about a cow?” We were like, “That’s brilliant.” And then of course I texted Bert, “Let’s do a cow.” And he’s like, “What about a cow on a Spyder?”

Rutherford: It was definitely a riffing moment, and it was, “How ridiculous can we make this? How memorable and disruptive can we end this spot?” And that was done in the heat of the moment.

Erin: The category [we were] shortlisted for at Cannes is brand partnerships and it makes a lot of sense. No one has done it this way before and it makes sense that Instacart’s the first one to do it. We work with our CPG partners constantly, and this is just a new way of working.

It’s actually created new opportunities. Now we’re doing a summer campaign called “Summer Like It’s 1999,” with prices from 1999. And we have Capri-Sun and Bagel Bites. Capri-Sun, like, stabbing it from the bottom and Bagel Bites burning the roof of your mouth. All of those nostalgic moments that primarily feature CPGs are totally part of our brand ethos now, and it’s coming to life over and over again since the Super Bowl.

Rutherford: We want to talk about how we bring in other brands as well. Maybe we should talk about the Wienermobile?

Erin: We had this whole experiential activation where we brought mascots together in real life, and a Wienermobile full of mascots came to a few lucky customers’ doors and delivered their groceries.

Rutherford: Even Grindr got in on the fun.

Erin: Grindr wanted to jump on board. Jack in the Box jumped on the bandwagon. What was so great about this idea was that it was contagious, and any brand that had a mascot wanted to participate on social, which is amazing.

Rutherford: Grindr said, “Will you pick me up in the Wienermobile on the way?” So that made a lot of sense for their brand too.