Super Bowl LII (ie. The 52nd one, for those who are not sports fans or Latin lovers) perhaps would be best numbered as “It’s a Tide Super Bowl.” A brilliant creative and media strategy hijacked the ad breaks to make a hero of the detergent brand. The ads featured the actor David Harbour, famous from Stranger Things, as a character who first establishes the idea that when very white clothes are seen on screen in any kind of ad, “It’s a Tide ad”. Then he proceeds to crop up five times more in other brands ads, determining that they are also Tide ads.
Agency: Saatchi & Saatchi, New York
Creative Direction: Chad Baker, Paul Bichler, Javier Campopiano, Daniel Lobaton
Art Direction: Jacopo Borcio, Erin Evon
Copywriter: Blake Morris
Director: Traktor
Production Company: Rattling Stick
"Why limit your airtime to your media buy? This one wins for staying in the minds of consumers when they least expect it."
- Marijke Spain, Innovation Creative Director, HeimatTBWA\
Brilliant brand collaborations, brilliant extension of how to get more from your (vast) media spend. For example, a new version of the great Old Spice campaign “The man your man could smell like,” (also in these pages) gets a reprise but with David Harbour inserted, declaring, alongside the original Old Spice Man, atop a stretched white horse, that this too is a Tide ad. The idea exploded across social during the Super Bowl game, with people posting their own #TideAd images … the hashtag trended only slightly behind that of #superbowllii itself. At the heart of the idea was a clever undermining of all advertising – in that ads tend to have people in often ridiculously perfect clean clothing – and twisting that to convince that Tide is how such standards are achieved. Very meta indeed, very 2018.
"Smart, simple and fun. Great hack to the Superbowl."
- Laura Rapela, Executive Creative Director, GUT Buenos Aires
