Instacart Deliver Nostalgia With a Twist

Super Bowl ads have become a pop culture tradition, with their own lore, main characters and memes. And since Tide crashed the Super Bowl with their 5-Star “It’s A Tide Ad” takeover in 2018 we’ve started to see more ads about the ads – commercials whose cultural references and jokes rely on viewers knowing other commercials.

This year, Instacart took this idea and ran with it. Their 30 second ad was crammed with an all-star cast of brand mascots and former Super Bowl sensations. Iconic mascots like the Jolly Green Giant and the Kool-Aid Man are here. So are notorious game night creations like Old Spice’s “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” and Mountain Dew’s PuppyMonkeyBaby, who opens the ad from TBWA\Chiat\Day. The ad has cameos and references to more than a dozen former campaigns from household name brands.

Hold on, though – with so many different brand mascots on screen where do Instacart themselves come in? This is what makes the ad such a clever piece of work. The parade of mascots isn’t just a gimmick, it’s an idea that’s uniquely suited to Instacart’s brand, the app that brings together all the household name groceries and delivers them to you all at once.

The campaign platform, “We’re Here”, also has a double meaning. It’s a nod to the fact that in 2025 Instacart were a Super Bowl debutant, which makes their strong performance especially impressive. But it’s also a slogan that underlines the platform’s promise – they are always available and always ready to deliver and save their customers time for other things.

In other words, the ad is a perfect marriage of creative idea, brand values, and execution that’s specific to a big moment. Exactly what a Super Bowl debut should look like. So how do real audiences respond to Instacart and their team of brand mascots?

On all three of our Test Your Ad measures the Instacart ad scores well over the average for the Supermarket category, landing a strong 4.1-Star Rating in our headline metric predicting long-term brand growth. It’s particularly impressive that Instacart outperform the average on Brand Fluency – our recognition score – as the ad is so crammed with other brands’ assets but Instacart still come through with strong branding at the end.

As Orlando Wood’s Lemon and Look Out explains, cultural references are always a powerful element in ads – used well they will increase effectiveness and emotional response. Mostly at the Super Bowl pop culture is represented by celebrity appearances, riffs on famous movies or TV shows, and classic songs on the soundtrack. But with almost sixty years of Super Bowl ads to draw on, it’s no surprise the ads themselves have become a nostalgic focus. Instacart prove you can use them effectively, and in spectacular style.

Our How to Win the Super Bowl report is filled with our top creative effectiveness tips that marketers can apply during the game and beyond. You can also catch our in-depth webinar analysis of the ads which aired during the biggest game.