Instacart's 'For Papa!' makes banana ripeness a Super Bowl musical — 2 Cannes Silvers

Instacart's CMO Laura Jones opened the brief with a blunt question: 'We want to do a single ad about bananas. How do we get anyone to care?' The answer lay in the brand's own data — bananas were its best-selling item, with more than 1.8 billion delivered and 32 million shopper notes about ripeness. The insight was that people care intensely about produce, and the barrier to online grocery was trusting a stranger to pick it.

So the brand built Preference Picker, an in-app slider that lets customers choose banana ripeness from not ripe to ripe, and announced it at the Super Bowl. Local Produce, Instacart's internal agency, worked with McCann and BBDO to invent a fictional Euro-pop duo — brothers Gary and John, played by Ben Stiller and Benson Boone — whose duet about choosing the perfect banana collapses into competitive chaos on a 60-foot glittering stage.

Spike Jonze directed the 30-second Super Bowl LX spot, two teasers ('Goals' and 'Harmonizing') and an extended director's cut, marking his first Super Bowl commercial in more than 20 years. To make it feel like a found broadcast, the team shot on vintage tube cameras with a 4:3 ratio, deliberately grainy, and built the world around the characters rather than casting celebrities as themselves.

The gamble paid off creatively: the campaign took Silvers in Film and Film Craft plus a Bronze in Entertainment Lions at Cannes 2026, entered the D&AD awards archive and was selected for TribecaX. For Instacart, it was the beginning of a full-funnel push for Preference Picker, extending from the Big Game into Times Square billboards and a social debate about the perfect banana.