2026 on Inside That Ad

Coca-Cola 'Drink in America': A Celebration for America's 250th

Wed, 08 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000

America’s 250th birthday arrives in 2026 in a cultural moment defined less by consensus celebration than by argument about what America is and who gets to claim it. Coca-Cola, which has spent decades being one of the most explicit carriers of American soft-power symbolism, chose to enter that moment with a campaign called “Drink in America” — a phrase operating simultaneously as product imperative and cultural instruction.

The Double Meaning

“Drink in America” is doing two things with the word “drink.” The first is the obvious one — Coca-Cola is a drink, and the campaign is about drinking Coca-Cola. The second is the invitation to drink in America as a scene, an experience, a thing to absorb rather than observe from a distance: “drink it in,” the way you drink in a view or a moment.

Google Gemini 'New Home': The Most Effective Super Bowl Ad of 2026

Wed, 08 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management ranked “New Home” as the most effective Super Bowl ad of 2026. That is a specific claim from a specific institution with a specific methodology, and it is worth taking seriously — not because rankings settle arguments, but because the criteria for effectiveness in their framework (emotional resonance, brand clarity, purchase intent) illuminate why the ad worked when so much AI advertising doesn’t.

The Story

A mother and son are moving into a new house. The rooms are empty. The future is hypothetical. They use Google Gemini — through text prompts, photo uploads, and the AI’s connected features — to imagine what those empty rooms could become: the furniture that could fill them, the colour that could warm the walls, the life that could happen inside these spaces.

Instacart 'Bananas': Spike Jonze Returns to the Super Bowl

Wed, 08 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Spike Jonze hasn’t directed a Super Bowl ad in more than twenty years. His return to the format — for Instacart’s “Bananas,” starring Ben Stiller and Benson Boone — is the kind of casting decision that either seems obvious in retrospect or never seems obvious at all, depending on whether the creative idea was good enough to justify it. “Bananas” is good enough to justify it.

The Concept

Ben Stiller and Benson Boone are a retro European disco-pop duo. The act is called something appropriately absurd. They perform a theatrical rivalry — played out on a 60-foot glitter-lit stage, shot on vintage tube cameras in an aesthetic that is more 1970s Italian television than Super Bowl commercial — over their competing banana preferences and the Instacart feature that resolves them: Preference Picker.

Levi's 'Backstory': Backsides, Doechii, and a 20-Year Return

Wed, 08 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Levi’s hasn’t run a Super Bowl ad in twenty years. The return, “Backstory,” is directed by Kim Gehrig and features James Brown’s “Get Up Offa That Thing” as the soundtrack to a film that shows its entire cast exclusively from behind. For the full runtime, the audience sees Levi’s jeans and the backs of the people wearing them — until the very end.

The campaign is called “Behind Every Original,” and the pun is doing real work.

Pepsi 'The Choice': Taika Waititi Sends the Polar Bear to a Rival

Wed, 08 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Comparative advertising is one of the oldest tools in the category playbook and one of the most dangerous. Done poorly, it elevates the competitor by naming them. Done well, it takes an icon belonging to the rival and makes it yours. Pepsi’s Super Bowl LX spot, directed by Taika Waititi, does the second thing — and does it with the Coca-Cola polar bear.

The Concept

“The Choice” opens on an unmistakable image: the Coca-Cola polar bear, the icon of the rival brand’s Christmas advertising since 1993. In a blind taste test, the bear chooses Pepsi Zero Sugar. The reveal triggers an existential crisis. The bear wanders, displaced, through a journey of self-discovery that ends with it choosing its own identity — and Pepsi.

Squarespace 'Unavailable': Yorgos Lanthimos and the Domain Crisis

Wed, 08 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Squarespace has made a habit of its Super Bowl spots by pairing the brand’s product — website creation — with a director who has no business being in an ad for website creation. The results have been consistently better than they have any right to be. “Unavailable,” directed by Yorgos Lanthimos and starring Emma Stone, is the latest entry in this tradition and possibly the most formally committed.

The Concept

Emma Stone tries to register emmastone.com. It’s taken. She tries variations — each one more desperate, more surreal, more detached from her actual identity as the name slips further away. Shot on black-and-white analogue film, the spot follows Stone’s gradual dissociation from her own name as the domain system’s neutral rejections (“Unavailable”) pile up into something that looks very much like an existential crisis.

VW 'Drivers Wanted' Returns: Johannes Leonardo's Super Bowl Bet

Wed, 08 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000

“Drivers Wanted” ran from 1995 to 2002 and was one of the defining brand platforms of its era — a campaign that made Volkswagen feel young, irreverent, and European in a way that American car advertising had not previously figured out. Reviving it is a high-wire act. The nostalgia trap is obvious: do it wrong and the resurrection reads as a brand out of ideas, reaching backward for borrowed credibility. Do it right and the platform’s equity transfers into the present moment.

Orange Egypt Understands Funny

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 10:00:00 +0000

The 2026 World Cup is upon us here in the United States and of course I start looking for ads and ad campaigns that capture my attention to present to you right here on InsideThatAd (ITA). And as luck would have it, I noticed one brand — Orange Egypt — that definitely understands comedy.

Telecom giant Orange Egypt launched a series of commercials ahead of the FIFA tournament. The creative concept directly addresses the typical cultural pessimism and anxiety of Egyptian football fans who often expect an early, group-stage exit. But this time they are encouraged with the tagline “To all the doubters, this time we’re staying longer” — or in Egyptian Arabic: لكل الشكاكين… المرة دي مطولين — the official slogan for Orange Egypt’s major World Cup ad campaign.

Dove 'The Game Is Ours': A Super Bowl Ad About Girls in Sport

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 09:30:00 +0000

The stat Dove leads with is real and it is damaging: by age 14, girls drop out of sport at twice the rate of boys. The reasons are well-documented — body image pressure, social comparison, a culture that critiques how female athletes look as readily as how they perform. “The Game Is Ours,” Dove’s Super Bowl LX entry created by Ogilvy and directed by Savanah Leaf, takes that fact and tries to turn it into a film worth running during the biggest advertising slot of the year.

Nike 'Rip the Script': The World Cup Ad That Rewrites the Hero

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 09:00:00 +0000

The most dangerous thing Nike can do is repeat itself. Forty years of “Just Do It” means the world knows exactly what a Nike ad is supposed to feel like — and knows, consequently, when it doesn’t feel like that. “Rip the Script,” launched ahead of the 2026 FIFA World Cup, is Nike choosing to take that risk.

What the Ad Does

“Rip the Script” opens with a familiar football hero setup — a player, a moment, the weight of expectation — and then deliberately, visibly, tears it apart. The campaign’s central idea is refusal: of the predictable, the prepared, the pre-written outcome. Directed by Dan Streit through Wieden+Kennedy Portland, the film works as both an ad for Nike and a manifesto against sporting cliché.