Humor on Inside That Ad

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.

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.

Amazon Five Star Theater: Benedict Cumberbatch Performs Customer Reviews

Thu, 25 Jun 2026 09:15:00 +0000

The premise sounds like it was written in one sentence and immediately greenlit: cast one of the most formally trained actors alive and have him perform the most informal writing on the internet as if it were Chekhov.

Amazon’s 2025 holiday campaign, “Five Star Theater,” features Benedict Cumberbatch — returning from a decade-long hiatus from live theater — delivering genuine five-star Amazon customer reviews as dramatic theatrical monologues. The reviews are real. The products are real. The performance is completely unhinged in the best possible way.

Vodafone Egypt Turns a 23-Year-Old Goal Into a National Joke

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 23:00:00 +0000

There’s a very specific kind of national joke that only works if the person at the center of it is in on it. Egypt has had one of those for over two decades: Magdy Abdelghani’s penalty goal against the Netherlands at Italia ‘90, which remained the country’s only World Cup goal for 23 straight years. That is until today when Mohamad Salah and the Egypt’s National Football Team won their first ever World Cup match against New Zealand. Vodafone Egypt and J. Walter Thompson Cairo built an entire commercial around the fact that everyone in Egypt has heard about that goal approximately one million times — and they got Abdelghani himself to play along.