“They’re running our ad in our app as an ad for their brand,” she explained. “Some of them are also using our ad on Meta, using our targeting, and then directing the traffic back to Instacart.”
Instacart’s 30-second spot, part of a broader brand platform called “We’re Here,” stars nine brand mascots: Chester Cheetah, the Old Spice man, Mr. Clean, the Energizer Bunny, Mountain Dew’s Puppy Monkey Baby, the Pillsbury Doughboy, the Jolly Green Giant, the Kool-Aid man, and a stampede of Heinz Wiener dogs.
The brands featured in the ad did not pay to be included. Instacart worked with the brands to get the rights and intellectual property of each mascot.
In the leadup to the game, some of those mascots helped Instacart deliver orders to both influencers and regular customers in New Orleans (the Big Game’s host city), Kansas City, and Philadelphia (the hometowns of the NFL teams competing for Super Bowl rings today).
The mascots also joined Instacart for media appearances like The Today Show and a social media partnership with Instagram account @whatisnewyork. But the unlock, Jones explained, is the compounded benefit created by working alongside brands that also advertise on Instacart.
“This is an opportunity to be our special sauce going forward,” Jones said. “We were the first of the delivery platforms to really build out a retail media network, so we have super close relationships with a lot of these brands.”
Jones said she hopes that after this experience, more brands will be interested in collaborating on content like the Super Bowl spot.
“We’re not as big as some of the other [retail media] players, but if we can partner up with CPGs, that gives us much bigger scale, with bigger reach,” she said. “Put the budgets together, and that gives you something to work with.”
