Instacart 'Bananas': Spike Jonze Returns to the Super Bowl
Spike Jonze hasn’t directed a Super Bowl ad in more than twenty years. His return to the format — for Instacart’s “Bananas,” starring Ben Stiller and Benson Boone — is the kind of casting decision that either seems obvious in retrospect or never seems obvious at all, depending on whether the creative idea was good enough to justify it. “Bananas” is good enough to justify it.
The Concept
Ben Stiller and Benson Boone are a retro European disco-pop duo. The act is called something appropriately absurd. They perform a theatrical rivalry — played out on a 60-foot glitter-lit stage, shot on vintage tube cameras in an aesthetic that is more 1970s Italian television than Super Bowl commercial — over their competing banana preferences and the Instacart feature that resolves them: Preference Picker.
The Preference Picker allows users to specify exactly how they want their produce — the ripeness of the banana, the size of the avocado, the specific curvature the banana should or should not have. The product truth is that Instacart lets you be specific about what you want. The advertising version of that truth is two deeply committed men disagreeing about bananas on a glittering disco stage.
Spike Jonze’s Approach
Jonze is the director who made the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage” video and “Being John Malkovich.” He works at the intersection of physical comedy and committed absurdism — his best work features people who are completely serious about things that are completely ridiculous, and the comedy lives in the gap between the gravity and the subject.
“Bananas” is in that tradition. Stiller and Boone are not winking at the camera. They are not playing characters who know they’re in a commercial. They are playing men for whom the banana question is a matter of deep personal conviction, and the stage design, the vintage cameras, and the orchestral production values are all in service of that conviction. Nothing is undercut.
Why This Works for Instacart
Instacart has a genuine product challenge: grocery delivery is increasingly commoditised. The Preference Picker is a real differentiator — it addresses the actual frustration of ordering produce online and receiving something that doesn’t match your expectation. But explaining a produce preference feature is not, at face value, the material of a Super Bowl ad.
Jonze’s solution is to never explain the feature directly. The commercial demonstrates the problem (two people have different banana preferences) and the solution (Instacart resolves it) through a completely insane narrative vehicle that is, nonetheless, emotionally coherent. You understand what Instacart is promising. You understand why it matters. You just learn it through a disco rivalry.
The Production Decision That Defines It
Shooting on vintage tube cameras is the detail that makes “Bananas” memorable rather than merely funny. It’s not a filter — it’s an actual production choice that gives the footage a specific texture, a slight bloom in the highlights, a colour grading that looks nothing like contemporary advertising.
The effect is that the ad feels like a found object rather than a commissioned one. The disco format, the vintage footage, the theatrical staging — all of these remove “Bananas” from the visual register of regular advertising, which is what allows it to live in the memory. It doesn’t look like a commercial. It looks like something Spike Jonze found in a vault and slightly improved.
Bananas as Strategy
Instacart is the number one selling item on Instacart. More than 1.8 billion bananas have been delivered through the platform. Building a Super Bowl ad around the most democratic, unglamorous product in the grocery category is a choice that communicates confidence: the brand doesn’t need to sell you on the exciting thing. It can build a $10 million Super Bowl campaign around a banana and trust that it lands.
It lands.
Client: Instacart Agency: Local Produce (in-house) / McCann / BBDO Director: Spike Jonze Stars: Ben Stiller, Benson Boone Year: 2026
