“On the first practice run of falling from the ladder, the actor almost fell for real,” recalls Mischief ECD Bianca Guimaraes. “She threw herself back so fearlessly that her co-star almost dropped her. We were all like, ‘Holy shit!'”

Next, during a storm, two smitten kittens hail a cab:

Note the license plate. Subtle.

Finally, rain beats down on a couple in a field of flowers (alas, with no cabs anywhere in sight).

“The production crew had to hire a snake wrangler on ‘Rain,'” Guimaraes says. “The guy was walking around to grab snakes and move them away from the set.”

Cute story. Icky, but cute.

As for the overall approach, “Daters today are nostalgic for the meet-cutes they’ve seen in old romcoms,” says Stephanie Danzi, SVP of marketing at Tinder. “But the reality is that the rom-com meet-cute is the exception, not the rule. Tinder is where modern-day meet-cutes happen.”

Of course, romcom spoofs are as common as broken hearts. Still, Tinder succeeds by nodding to genre conventions while not overloading on satire. The campaign zings a treasured (if trite) art-form, good-naturedly goofing on its audience’s tastes.

“Only 8 percent of offline daters say it’s easy for them to find a date IRL, and so many missed out on opportunities to connect in the midst of the pandemic,” adds brand CMO Melissa Hobley. “At Tinder, we want to empower our users to find meaningful connections that carry into IRL.”

Showing text convos during the spots—these exchanges are very non-Hollywood, natch—reinforces that notion. The app experience fuses with real-life hopes and expectations, sparking enough cuteness to make viewers smile, scream, sigh … or whatever.

Patrick Mahomes just made a new Coors Light commercial. Let’s bury it in the cold, hard ground until he retires!

You can visit the brand’s YouTube channel tomorrow to watch the stunt live.

It’s part of a campaign that plays off the NFL’s somewhat restrictive rules for its players who endorse beer and alcoholic beverages. They can, in fact, pitch such products. But they’re subject to all sorts of league regulations.

That’s the crux of a long-running brand platform with Mahomes. You might recall him shilling for Coors Light Bear last year. Heh.

Now, the joke is that Coors can’t show PM’s new spot until after he retires. Hence, the aforementioned capsule.

This meta merriment also features the Chill Train. And sends up action flicks. Plus, we get Mahomes bobbleheads—with the future Hall of Famer’s face obscured.

Mischief @ No Fixed Address developed the push.

What would they do if his beer ad efforts weren’t so “restricted”? Plant No.15 atop a Rocky Mountain and make him bellow “DRINK COORS LIGHT!” for 90 seconds? 

I’d buy a couple sixes to see that. Maybe a whole case.

Anyhoo, Pixel Pat sells for $15, supporting Mahomes’ charitable foundations.

“It’s more popular than wall-mounted dual-actuating drinking fountains.”

Tubi makes that weirdly random claim in funny work breaking today from Mischief @ No Fixed Address. The campaign aims to dispel the Fox-owned streamer’s status as a challenger brand, 

Ads directed in silly, surreal style by Andreas Nilsson compare Tubi’s more than 75 million viewers—way up from a year ago—to all sorts of “popular” stuff. Note the quote marks. In these commercials, the notion of “popularity” is loosely (and numerically) defined.

And in each case, of course, Tubi comes out ahead. Sorry, drinking fountains.

“We wanted to show advertisers our scale by adding context to our numbers that show our scale in a fun, irreverent way,” a Tubi rep tells Muse.

What’s more, “We often hear that Tubi feels like something viewers have discovered and that we’re the best kept secret in streaming. So, we wanted viewers to know the secret is out and they are among millions of other Tubi lovers,” the rep says.

Divorce plays into the campaign, too, along with babies and Old Faithful (a fountain of sorts, though not wall mounted).

“Old Faithful erupts roughly every hour and 15 minutes and when we arrived on set, storm clouds were approaching quickly,” the rep recalls. “We were in the middle of a safety briefing with park rangers and the team had to scramble to get the shot with a bit of blue sky. That opening scene was shot on a hand held camera over the shoulder.”

Tubi and Mischief are all about irreverent marketing. This latest effort earns extra points for using actual data to entertainingly lampoon data-driven hype while still delivering a compelling brand message.

Past efforts include 2023’s lauded Super Bowl spot with giant creepy bunnies, cinema send-ups all about the thrills of media buying, and exceptionally wacky sitcom spoofs.

CREDITS

Tubi
Chief Marketing Officer – Nicole Parlapiano
Senior Vice President, B2B Marketing – Cynthia Clevenger
Vice President, Brand and Consumer Marketing – Jeff Campbell
Senior Program Manager – Tiana Harris 
Director, Media – Leisha Bereson

Mischief
Films
CCO and Co-Founder – Greg Hahn
Partner & Executive Creative Director – Bianca Guimaraes
Partner & Executive Creative Director – Kevin Mulroy
CD – Carl Peterson 
CD – Eleanor Rask
EVP, Production – Will Dempster
Senior Producer – Hannah Kessler
Partner & Head of Strategy – Jeff McCrory
EVP, Strategy – Ed Gunn
Strategist – Hannah Hugeback
Partner & President – Kerry McKibbin
Managing Director – Tyler Harris
Group Account Director – Sam Crawford
Account Supervisor – Anthony Williams 
Partner & Head of Development – Oliver McAteer

Director: Andreas Nilsson
Founding Partner: Shawn Lacy
Executive Producer: Holly Vega
Producer: Cathy Green & Jay Veal
Head of Production: Sean Moody
Director of Photography: Lasse Frank
Production Designer: Jon Blud
Costume Designer: Claudia Martins
Makeup and Hair Stylist: Eva Quilez

SPAIN SERVICE CO – 24/7
Producer: Edu Olavide
EP: Lole Ramírez
EP / Ambassador: Jordi Mollà
1 st AD: Ferran Rial
Production Manager: Monica Canellas
Production Coordinator: Reinaldo Lancaster
Talent Coordinator: Eva Cid
Location Manager: Marcel Tomas

Edit – Mack Cut 
Editor – Ian Mackenzie 
Edit Assistant – Zach Gentry 
Executive Producer – Gina Pagano 

Post Production: BaconX
VFX Supervisor/CD: Jonas Drehn
Producer: Daniella Strand
Lead Compositor: Jacob Carlsson
Compositors:  Adam Isaksson, Mathias Valentin, James Johnston
Colourist: Sam Gilling
Conform and mastering: Oliver Wozny
Delivery and versioning: Larsen VFX

Audio – Wave 
Executive Producer – Vicky Ferraro
Producer – Eleni Giannopoulos
Sound Engineer – Aaron Reynolds & Austin Ferreria 

Music – Human
Executive Producer – James Wells

Mischief
OOH
VP, Client Operations & Delivery – Petra Simpson
Senior Production Artist – Gavin Gillespie
Senior Production Artist – John Rodrigues
Studio Manager – Sheila Jacklin

Is there a therapist in the house?

Our brain cells died oh so satisfied watching that broad branded stupidity from Mischief @ No Fixed Address.

Elsewhere, sans mascot, Chili’s gets up in McDonald’s grill with spots from Jon Marshall & Daughters:

The campaign sells a simple menu/pricing message with twisted, peppy panache. It’s memorable and seamlessly on brand.

Best of all: the mascot’s a self-centered, neurotic loud-mouthed mess. Make a pull-string version that plays his cray take on the jingle. It’ll sell out fast!

Expert puppeteers at Steffx Studio designed the lumpy grump, and it took four technicians working together to make him move.

“Credit to the Chilis team. When we first showed them this monster they said, ‘Can you make his teeth worse?'” recalls Mischief group creative director Ross Fletcher.

The notion to have the chili pepper riff on the baby back ribs song developed on set.

“We thought it conveyed his desire to be the Chili’s mascot,” says Howard Finkelstein, also an agency GCD. “And it really made us laugh.”

He adds: “The real hero is the actor who had to spend a whole day inside the suit. I caught a whiff in there. It did not smell good.”

Like the headline says: That pepper’s hawt!

And this might be Mischief’s most memorably bizarre character—which is really saying something. Past doozies (all of the animal variety) include Outback’s creepy Xmas koala; Eos’ foxes that wear people; FanDuel’s existential chickens; and Tubi’ weird, award-winning Super Bowl bunnies.

Super Bowl is the one thing our parents and their sassy movie club text chains understand about our jobs. So the stakes are high.

But not nearly as high as the stakes for our clients, who are (very understandably) terrified to spend the equivalent of Sly Stallone’s Hidden Hills estate on a 30-second commercial viewed during watch parties awash in beers, room temperature meats and nagging bladders.

The problem with a huge budget is that it comes with massive amounts of fear, scrutiny, stress and the opinion of that guy who did that one thing that one time in the ’90s.

Which lures you into thinking from the outside in: Which celebrity can we get? What song can we license? How many talking animals are too many? Let’s check Taika Waititi’s avails.

If you don’t feel like reading Rick Rubin’s book on creativity (you should, and I’ve heard he narrates his own audio book and it’s mesmerizing), here’s one overarching theme: Trying to come up with something you think the audience will like is the fastest way to make something the audience will not like.  

Why? Because what the audience actually wants is the best possible execution of a great idea–something you really love, not a focus-grouped celebrity-fest with or without Will Ferrell. What people actually want is something simple, insightful, (sometimes) weird, (sometimes) funny and, I’d argue, most of all, unexpected. 

At Mischief, we have a two-step process for developing ideas: 1). What are we trying to say? and 2). What’s the most interesting way to say it? The problem with your ginormous budget is it can make you think the process should be different for the Super Bowl. But it’s not.

Let’s look at three recent examples, none of which were ruined by a big, fat, potentially idea-ruining budget. 

“It’s a Tide Ad” 2018

You don’t even have to rewatch this campaign to remember what it was saying: Tide cleans clothes. To me, the best line of an impeccably executed idea was, “So, does that make every Super Bowl ad … a Tide ad?” Now, every spot in the Big Game that’s not for laundry detergent is a letdown. Did they need Stranger Things actor David Harbour to be in those ads? He’s great. But no, they didn’t. Did you remember his name is David Harbour? No, you didn’t.

Chrysler, “Born of Fire” (aka “Imported from Detroit”) 2011

This Chrysler spot with Eminem had one of the most well-written scripts I’ve heard in the last decade. What was their point? Detroit makes cars. Then they wrote a script that’s so good it made me mad, and made all of America, for exactly 60 seconds, go “Fuck yeah! America is Detroit!” Which is not an easy thing to do. Is this idea a million times better with Eminem? Of course it is, but that’s the power of an intentional and thoughtful use of a celebrity (and the incredibly tasteful choice of using just the intro to “Lose Yourself”). And then an intern was like, “What about a choir at the end?” And they were like, “You got it, kid.”

Tubi, “Interface Interruption” 2023

Hey look at that, one of our own commercials made the list! We got to the idea with a simple realization: the product is also a product demo. Yes, we had celebrities, but they were Kevin Burkhardt and Greg Olsen, the actual announcers for the game. We used them to make it look like the broadcast had returned from the commercial break, only to have someone switch from the Super Bowl to Tubi, casually stroll titles, and land on Mr. and Mrs. Smith. My favorite anecdote from that spot is that we made 500 people in a Vegas betting room crane their necks to see whose dog sat on the remote.

Again, and I can’t emphasize this enough: I like big juicy budgets, too. I’m just less fond of the budget leading the idea, as opposed to the other way around. I’d also like to go on record as saying that I’d still like to work with Will Ferrell. And let’s check Taika Waititi’s avails, just in case.

CLICK HERE to watch all of this year’s Super Bowl commercials as they’re released. 
 

This ad prompted us to do a New Year’s cleansing of every contact with the last name “Tinder” from our phones. Justin Tinder, we hardly new ye.

Below, we learn that if a swipe goes well, daters can score a second wardrobe, a goodnight kiss (in the A.M.!) or an Italian who knows all the right spots … for authentic cuisine.

“Our brand platform ‘It Starts With a Swipe’ is resonating because it is rooted in real user, brand and product truths,” says Stephanie Danzi, SVP, head of global marketing at Tinder. “As we built this third wave of creative work, we knew that Gen Z is completely redefining what relationships look like, and they are dating with no specific outcome in mind.”

“They are optimistic and excited about their dating adventure and all of the opportunities and life-changing moments it can uncover,” she says. “They are exploring with confidence and without labels. We wanted to showcase that spirit of possibility and exploration, and we did that by celebrating the emotions and micro-milestones that come from the early stages of meeting someone new.”

“The creative is meant to deliver that feeling of butterflies that come at the beginning of a relationship, when you’re just getting to know each other, and remind you that so many amazing possibilities can come from a swipe.”

There’s a series of viral TikToks that show men moisturizing with Eos’ vanilla cashmere lotion. Apparently, women worry such hype will lead to a product shortage. So, the brand and Mischief developed a “Lotion Lock” to address the situation.

Special bottles sport locks that open based on combinations of letters, numbers and emojis (purple devil, broken heart, rocket ship and star). Those interested can visit eoslotionlock.com to snag a free and amazingly secure container.

“Eos spends so much of its time listening to its highly-engaged community. When we saw that men had discovered our body lotion, deep social listening also showed us that women were sharing concerns that this hype would lead to a shortage of a product which is already extremely popular,” says Carley Caldas, vice president of brand marketing and media. “The Lotion Lock is our response—safeguarding your product from partners, friends and roommates who want to smell like vanilla cashmere. Because, who wouldn’t?”

The product is in prototype phase and will be developed depending on demand. (We bet you’ll be seeing more of these next year.)

CREDITS

Eos
Soyoung Kang, Chief Marketing Officer
Carley Caldas, VP, Brand Marketing and Media
Kirby Reynolds, Senior Brand Manager, Content & Social
Laura Bierbaum, VP Public Relations & Corporate Comms 

Mischief @ No Fixed Address
Greg Hahn, Co-Founder and CCO
Bianca Guimaraes, Partner & Executive Creative Director
Kevin Mulroy, Partner & Executive Creative Director
Hunter Fine, Creative Director 
Marcus Lim, Art Director
Will Dempster, EVP Production
Danielle Balanov,  Producer 
Elly Lupi, Business Manager 
Kerry McKibbin, President & Partner
Kelsey Brown, Account Director
Jeff McCrory, Partner & Head of Strategy 
Hannah Newport, Strategy Director
Oliver McAteer, Head of Development & Partner

Production Company:  Lobo
Managing Partner  Lobo: Luis Ribeiro
Executive Producer Lobo: Su Constantine
Creative Director Lobo: Mateus de Paula Santos
Director: Marco Wey
Head of Production: Marcelo Barbosa
Producer: Vitor David 
Post-Production Coordinator: Rosangela Gomes
Post-Production Producer: Melina Prior
Compositing Artist: Leandro Pena
CG Supervisor: Fabio Shigemura
Modeling: Natan Zuanaci
CG Animation: Marco Wey
Lighting & Render: Marco Wey
Motion Graphics Artist: Marccos Chaves
Ingest / Conform / Delivery:  Marco Tavares / Isabela Balbo / Fabio Augusto
Color: Letícia Blanco
Music: PB Music Design2

Nice stache, not creepy at all.

“This campaign represents our commitment to championing consumer protection,” says Catherine Ferdon, head of brand at Cash App. “The online nature of today’s most popular scam tactics can make people second guess what’s real, but we want to ensure that our users—and the general public—understand the signs to look out for. This campaign encapsulates Cash App’s commitment to demystifying scams and empowering users to trust their instincts.”

Remember, if someone says they’re a customer-service rep and demands personal info, do NOT share one blessed thing:

“Even though online scammers are getting more sophisticated, the language they use is still really strange and riddled with red flags,” says Mischief associate creative director Craig Shervin.

Example: The notion of “flipping” cash for profit. It’s a flipping lie!

“We’re pointing out those red flags and hoping the next time people see them, they think, scam!” says David Spradlin, also a Mischief ACD.

Running across social, the commercials rock the agency’s signature style. While amusing, they’re edgy, too, and that mix memorably drives the brand message.