Instacart take an oblique approach with this touching, emotional new ad, opting to tell a story and stay in the background rather than push their delivery and pick-up product forward. It’s a strategy with benefits and risks, and both of them show up in the Test Your Ad results for “Bunny Ears”.
The story Instacart are telling is about a busy mom and her young son. She’s trying to get him to school on time and fit in a million other jobs, but he has only one thing on his mind: his friends can all tie their shoelaces, and he feels left out. So Mom patiently sits with him, teaching and encouraging him how to make the “bunny ears” he can tie the laces with, and when he eventually manages it, the ad lingers on their shared delight. Meanwhile, in the background, she’s ordered groceries via Instacart and they arrive. The convenience of the Instacart app means she doesn’t have to take time out from those precious moments with her kid.
It’s a very sweet ad, and you only have to look at the moment-by-moment Trace report on Test Your Ad to see what an emotional impact it makes – there’s a huge surge in Happiness when the kid learns how to tie their shoelaces and mom and son embrace. It also lands at a 4.2-Star Rating, which indicates strong potential for share gain with the right level of investment and is way above the Supermarket category average. The ad works so well because it taps into a common truth – that parents are desperate for time to spend with and help their kids, and all the more so if it’s a milestone moment like learning to tie shoelaces.
The ad also works as a way of getting the right hemisphere of the brain to pay attention – as Orlando Wood explains in Look Out, this is the kind of attention that builds long-term memories and helps grow brands. Ads with “between-ness” – which focus on the relationship between and communication between two characters – do very well at getting this attention, and you can’t get much more between-ness than with a mother and child.
At the same time, the decision to push the brand further back in the ad to dial up the emotion could risk losing Brand Fluency. While overall the ad scores a good 86% Fluency, above the category average, it falls down on Fast Fluency – rapid recognition of a brand, which helps predict short-term sales in the Spike Rating. Here Fast Fluency is a low 42%, even though the ad is a highly emotional one, which means overall Spike Rating is low.
So the storytelling strategy Instacart are using has a big benefit – it’s well ahead of the category average for Star Rating and long-term growth. But it has an impact on short-term Spike Rating because the brand isn’t apparent quickly enough – fortunately as advertising problems go, this is no harder to fix than tying your laces! With a stronger early role for the brand, the great emotional storytelling in this commercial could truly shine.
Often during back to school season the “list” becomes the focus. We get so caught up in checking things off the list we forget what the end of summer actually represents: a new chapter in your kid’s life. And brands tend to follow suit - with ads that prominently feature the “stuff” of back to school, but not the feelings.
This year, we chose to spotlight what’s not on the list and instead invited parents to lean on Instacart so they can have more space to sink into the little moments of parenthood that are so easy to rush through.
Bunny Ears is our love letter to busy parents - our hope with this creative is that parents feel seen and supported. And the next time they find themselves wishing for more time or mental bandwidth they turn to Instacart.
Taylor Erin
Executive Creative Director, Instacart
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