Skittles Commercial: The Broadway Musical
The Super Bowl: for 50 years it’s been seen as marketing’s biggest stage, where $5 million dollars buys you a TV ad and 100 million eyeballs. But what if there was an even bigger stage? Enter “Skittles Commercial: The Broadway Musical”. Instead of following years of established Super Bowl wisdom, we partnered with Skittles and DDB to skip the 30 second TV ad and made a full 30-minute Broadway Musical starring Michael C. Hall.
The one showing of “Skittles Commercial: The Broadway Musical” on Super Bowl Sunday sold out within 72 hours of its announcement. But we wanted to create buzz beyond just the people attending. So, we used online film, a music video release of our title track called ‘Advertising Ruins Everything,’, and even a full cast recording album on Spotify to get people talking.
We set out to get attention and “Skittles Commercial: The Broadway Musical” delivered. The campaign got written about in over 1,000 publications. Our ad was even reviewed by the New York Times and Washington Post theater sections. It ended up with over 2.5 billion earned impressions. Over 25 x the viewership an ad receives on the big game. All with $0 dollars spent on the actual Super Bowl.
Reviews
– Peter Mark, The Washington Post “It’s metamodernism at its finest, feeding us a veritable rainbow of competing impulses; at any given moment, you want to groan or buckle over laughing. Skittles has been producing top-tier absurdist advertising for years now, but this is their crowning achievement; this may be the most socially relevant advertisement of any kind of the past few years.”
– Jesse Damiani, Forbes“An absurdist rabbit-hole of a tale that parodied Super Bowl advertising while advertising the hell out of those fruit-flavored candies.”
– Greg Evans, Deadline“This rainbow-flavored existential crisis was the most exciting thing to happen on Super Bowl Sunday, and it will never be seen again.”
– Hayley Levitt, Theater Mania
Credits
Year
2019
Directed by
Sarah Benson
Client
Skittles
Agency
DDB
Written by
Nathaniel Lawlor
Will Eno
Composed by
Drew Gasparini
Produced by
Patrick Milling-Smith
Ari Weiss
Executive Produced by
Colin Selikow
Matt Blitz
Cody Ryder
Berta de Pablos-Barbier
Rankin Carroll
Debbie Litow
Starring
Michael C. Hall
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