Publix Makes Shopping Magical With Dreamy Ad

Supermarket Publix gets our Ad Of The Week with a commercial which goes big on a particular type of happiness – sensory pleasure. It’s a spot which follows a young woman as she turns her store visit into a beautiful daydream. Flowers bloom as she passes them; sprinkles from a cookie fill the air, and the frozen food department turns into a winter wonderland as she reaches for the ice cream. She even gets a smile from a handsome guy working in the fresh produce section.

It’s a blissful reverie which is only punctured by the ring of the till – all this time she’s been ringing her groceries through. She smiles, leaves the store and we see Publix’s slogan “Where shopping is pleasure” underlining the message of the ad. The whole ad has a distinctive soundtrack – the instrumental from UK band The Verve’s 90s hit “Bittersweet Symphony”, which adds another layer of dreamy happiness to the film.

Happiness is the greatest driver of successful emotional response to an ad, and so it’s also the greatest driver of long-term effectiveness. One thing we do on the Test Your Ad Pro platform is look into which types of happiness an ad evokes, from amusement for humorous ads to a sense of being uplifted and inspired. There’s no special formula for which types of happiness ads should create in viewers, and successful commercials often strike two or three different notes.

Publix’s ad, though, shows the benefits of going all in on one particular positive vibe, turning a Publix store into a fantasy realm where pleasure rules. Everything in the ad is designed to evoke different sensory experiences, from the scent of flowers to the fresh feel in the produce section when the sprinklers come on. When the girl walks into the frozen food aisle you can almost feel the temperature drop and the snow and darkness makes the experience seem magical. Light, sound and special effects are all aligned.

The result of this focus is an ad which scores unusually well with real audiences, beating the category average for US Supermarkets on all three of our main Test Your Ad metrics. It gets a strong 4.0-Star Rating result in our headline measure, which predicts long-term potential for share gain given the right investment. That’s way above the 2.5-Star average for the supermarket category. And it gets an equally strong result in Spike Rating, which predicts short-term sales boosts.

Shopping in a supermarket is not an experience most Americans love. With this ad and its strong sensory focus, Publix is able to take a mundane experience and imbue it with a magical feeling. And the Test Your Ad results are proof that real shoppers love the idea.