Instacart sells its AI assistant with Shrek's dinner
Rather than explain what an agent does, the grocery company shows people getting hungry at the television and ordering.
The hardest brief in advertising right now is making artificial intelligence feel like a habit instead of a feature list. Instacart skipped the explanation entirely and went looking for a craving.
"Turn any idea into an order," the launch campaign for the company's new AI shopping assistant, Clementine, debuted during Sunday Night Football on NBC and now runs across linear television, streaming, YouTube, audio, social, and inside the Instacart app. Four spots share one structure: someone is watching something, food appears on screen, and the craving becomes a cart.
A "Solo Dinner" spot opens on the 2001 DreamWorks film "Shrek," with the ogre settling in for a meal of swamp fare, which somehow resolves into a butternut squash risotto. Another builds on Scooby-Doo's famously oversized sandwiches. Spots referencing "The Office" and "A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving" follow later in the fall. Hormel and Hillshire products appear in the creative, which is its own quiet piece of retail media business.
Clementine itself launched in North America earlier this month, built on transaction data from more than 1.6 billion lifetime orders and pitched at the household question nobody wants to answer at six o'clock. The company's in-house agency, Local Produce, developed the campaign, Prettybird produced it, and Brian McGinn directed.
The choice worth noting is that the assistant is never introduced as capability. It is introduced as the thing you reach for after the screen makes you hungry, which is a behavior the audience already has. Rivals Uber Eats and DoorDash have shipped similar assistants. Nostalgia is the part they cannot copy this fall.
Kyle Duford, Founder & Editor, BRNDWIRE. More from Kyle →
