The archive · Advertising · Marketing decision · 2018–2021
Tide's 'It's a Tide Ad' hijacks Super Bowl 2018 — sales +35%, US Grand Effie 2019
During the 2018 Super Bowl, Tide aired fake ads for cars, pharma and mattresses that all turned out to be Tide — sales rose 35% in two weeks.
Tide (Procter & Gamble)
What it had to solve
Tide was the category leader but faced private-label price pressure, and a single Super Bowl spot could be forgotten in a night full of them. P&G and Saatchi & Saatchi wanted the game's entire commercial break to sell Tide.
How it works
Heading into Super Bowl LII in February 2018, Tide was the laundry leader but faced premium erosion, and a single expensive spot risked being one of dozens people forgot. Procter & Gamble and Saatchi & Saatchi New York's idea was to stop competing inside Tide's own slots: if Tide makes clothes clean, then every commercial showing clean clothes was, in a sense, a Tide ad.
David Harbour filmed a dozen spots in four days — a tennis commercial, a pharma ad, a car ad, a mattress ad — and during the game each one broke character to reveal it was actually a Tide ad. The running gag made every crisp shirt in every other brand's Super Bowl spot into evidence for Tide, and viewers were invited to keep watching for the next reveal.
The results were exceptional: Tide was the most-loved brand of the Super Bowl, sales rose 35% within two weeks and grew to over $75m within a year, and WARC's Effective 100 ranked It's a Tide Ad the most effective campaign of 2019. It won the US Grand Effie in 2019 and the inaugural FMCG Global Grand Effie in 2021.
Why it lands
- It converted other advertisers' media into Tide's media: any spot with clean clothes became supporting evidence for the claim.
- The multi-spot running gag rewarded following the whole broadcast, turning passive viewers into active detectives.
- It defended a premium price with logic instead of discounts — if it's clean, it's Tide.
- A single elastic insight powered a dozen executions, a live social layer and a year of follow-on content.
What it did
Tide was the most-loved brand of the Super Bowl; sales rose 35% within two weeks and grew to over $75m within a year. WARC ranked It's a Tide Ad the world's most effective campaign of 2019, and it won the US Grand Effie in 2019 and the inaugural FMCG Global Grand Effie in 2021.
What you can take
Own the category's shared truth instead of renting an audience: by claiming every clean outfit proved a Tide ad, Tide made every other brand's paid media sell for it — dominance without spending more.
Since then
The spots kept airing and the concept continued after the game, and 'hijacking the ad break' became a template other brands tried to copy. P&G was named the most effective marketer in the 2019 US Effie rankings, and WARC's Effective 100 confirmed It's a Tide Ad as the most-awarded effectiveness campaign of 2019. The idea is now a standard media-planning and branded-entertainment case study.
Sources
- 'It's a Tide Ad' by Procter & Gamble & Saatchi & Saatchi New York wins Grand Effie at the 2019 Effie Awards U.S.
- Five Super Bowl Ads That Scored Big in Marketing Effectiveness
- WARC unveils Effective 100 rankings
- Q&A: How Stranger Things' David Harbour Helped Tide Hijack the Super Bowl
- The Five Best Super Bowl Ads of 2018
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