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

Bananas were Instacart's number-one product — more than 1.8 billion delivered, with 32 million shopper notes about ripeness — yet the biggest barrier to online grocery was trusting someone else to pick fresh items. For its second Super Bowl appearance, the brand needed to launch Preference Picker, a new in-app slider for choosing banana ripeness, on the biggest stage in advertising.

Launch a produce-ripeness feature by making banana selection the subject of a retro Euro-pop Super Bowl musical showdown.

Instacart's internal agency Local Produce teamed up with McCann and BBDO to turn the feature into 'For Papa!': Ben Stiller and Benson Boone play fictional Euro-pop brothers whose polished duet about choosing perfect bananas escalates into a musical showdown on a 60-foot LED stage. Spike Jonze directed the 30-second Super Bowl LX spot, two teasers and an extended director's cut, shooting on vintage tube cameras in 4:3 so the whole thing felt like an unearthed 1980s broadcast.

The spot landed at Cannes 2026 with Silvers in Film and Film Craft plus a Bronze in Entertainment Lions, entered the D&AD awards archive, and was selected for TribecaX. It made a utilitarian slider feel like a precision instrument, and CMO Laura Jones called it the launch of a full-funnel Preference Picker campaign backed by Times Square billboards and a 'Great Banana Debate' social push.

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.

It built a world around fictional characters instead of casting celebrities as themselves, giving the film room to be entertainment rather than endorsement.

The contrast — operatic Euro-pop spectacle devoted to banana ripeness — made a functional feature feel like a precision instrument worth obsessing over.

It was grounded in product truth: 1.8 billion bananas and 32 million shopper notes made the obsession real, not invented.

Spike Jonze's practical, vintage-camera approach gave the spot a distinct visual identity that matched the retro-futuristic world.

The campaign treated the Super Bowl slot as the launch of a full-funnel idea, not a one-off film — teasers, a director's cut and social extensions kept it alive.

Give the customer's obsession operatic seriousness instead of a feature spec: it made a banana-ripeness slider memorable and proved the brand cares about the details shoppers obsess over.

After airing in Super Bowl LX on 8 February 2026, 'For Papa!' was recognised at Cannes 2026 (Silver Film, Silver Film Craft, Bronze Entertainment), entered the D&AD awards archive and was selected for TribecaX. Instacart continued the Preference Picker push with the 'Great Banana Debate' social campaign, Times Square billboards and print, and announced plans to extend the ripeness picker to avocados and deli meat thickness — a functional feature launched as a pop-culture moment.