This year’s Super Bowl contenders, the Kansas City Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles, are both veterans of the biggest game of the year. While the lineup of advertisers includes a fair share of rookies, there are also plenty of Super Bowl vets—including Uber Eats.
The delivery platform is set to run its fifth straight Super Bowl ad this weekend. As viewers have come to expect from the brand over the years, the campaign will feature a wacky plot and a star-studded cast, with an emphasis this year on cementing the connection between food and football, Danielle Hawley, Uber’s global head of creative and brand, told Marketing Brew.
“It’s a love letter to football fans,” Hawley said. “At the same time, we know that there’s a lot more people watching the Super Bowl than [who] watch football all season long, and we took into consideration very carefully who to cast…to appeal to more people than just sports fans.”
If Matthew McConaughey’s football conspiracy theories and Mike Ditka impression don’t do it for viewers, surely Martha Stewart and Charli xcx doing “this and yap” will. That’s at least the hope of Hawley and the rest of the Uber creative team as they seek to end an NFL season-long brand campaign on a high note.
Debunked
Throughout football season, Uber Eats’s campaign has centered on the idea that football was invented to make people hungry. The campaign has been anchored by McConaughey, who, in an ad from this fall alongside San Francisco 49ers running back Christian McCaffrey, makes some compelling points, like noting food-centric football terms like turnovers, pancake blocks, and scrambles.
The brand’s Super Bowl ad is “like the season finale” of that campaign, said Matthew Woodhams-Roberts, COO and partner at Uber Eats’s agency Special Group US, and in the ad, McConaughey builds on his theory with additional evidence, like the fact that Apple Music sponsors the halftime show and the host stadium is the Caesars (salad) Superdome.
After several teasers, the brand will air a 60-second spot in the second quarter of the game that tracks the history of the conspiracy theory and also features Kevin Bacon, Greta Gerwig, and Hot Ones host Sean Evans.
Star power
The Uber Eats team is all in on the celebrity-centric approach to Super Bowl ads. For its Super Bowl debut in 2021, the brand worked with Cardi B, Mike Myers, and Dana Carvey, and in 2022, it was Jennifer Coolidge, Nicholas Braun, Trevor Noah, and Gwyneth Paltrow. The 2023 campaign starred Sean “Diddy” Combs before he was charged with sex trafficking and racketeering, and last year’s ad featured Jennifer Aniston, David Schwimmer, Usher, Jelly Roll, David Beckham, and Victoria Beckham.
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Hawley said it has gotten easier to recruit A-list talent every year, as Uber Eats builds a reputation for working with celebrities in a way that can benefit both parties—like when Paltrow got some airtime for her brand Goop in the 2022 ad. The brand’s track record of authentic humor has also helped attract collaborators, Woodhams-Roberts said.
“New talent is very willing to jump in and know that we’re going to create something very funny together, and we’re going to treat them as their honest selves,” he said. “They’re going to actually be able to bring their true self to the table and have fun with that.”
Keep it simple
Brands that rely on celebrities for their Super Bowl ads face the risk of being overshadowed by stars, but so far, that hasn’t seemed to be a problem for Uber Eats: The brand outperformed all of its cast except for Paltrow by search volume immediately after the game in 2022, Marketing Brew previously reported, and it scored one of the highest proper recall percentages of last year’s Super Bowl advertisers.
“We think about our celebrities as other avenues to audiences that we otherwise wouldn’t have access to in a moment like the Super Bowl,” Hawley said.
Between the celebs and more than a dozen pieces of content, including teasers and a salad collab with Stewart, it might seem like the Uber Eats team is doing the most. But if they’ve learned one thing from their half a decade of Super Bowl advertising, it’s that simpler is better, Hawley and Woodhams-Roberts said. Hawley said she hopes that if viewers remember anything, it’s that football equals food.
“Simplicity is so important to let people in on the joke, in on the storytelling, so that they can laugh along with it,” Woodhams-Roberts said. “When they’re in on it, they remember it.”