Amazon: Winning the Super Bowl from London

n 2018, we were given the challenge of using the Super Bowl to show just how useful and helpful Alexa is for customers. But this is the Super Bowl, the noisiest advertising event of the year so we needed to find an entertaining and engaging way to talk about this, rather than simply list off all the rational reasons the Alexa is superior to the competition.

So, we asked a simple question:

What would happen if Alexa lost her voice?

Could anyone possibly replace her?

The campaign featured a number of celebrity Alexa stand-ins: Gordon Ramsey, Cardi B, Rebel Wilson, Leslie Jones and Sir Anthony Hopkins. They all turned out to be total failures, proving just how irreplaceable Alexa is but giving Amazon a real feeling of humanity.

We created content playing with this idea, in social, PR and the devices themselves. Before the match, you could ask Alexa who would win the Super Bowl and she’d cough, teasing what was to come. There were also teasers of the celebrities receiving their headsets so before the campaign launched, 50M people had seen our idea online and 1M had interacted with the device.

The campaign was declared winner of USA Today’s Super Bowl Ad Meter, Ad Age’s Super Bowl Ranking and YouTube’s AdBlitz. It was even nominated for an Emmy.

Not everything makes the cut...

It was going to be a tough act to follow, but we were determined to keep building on success of the first campaign.

Amazon is perceived as very functional (the main benefits of using Amazon are speed and ease), and due to its size, it can be seen as cold, and perhaps even clinical to some customers. To show the more human side of the brand, and to keep raising the creative bar each year, we’ve asked ourselves increasingly hilarious ‘what if’ questions about Alexa. We have poked fun at the imaginary failures the company has faced whilst emphasising the true brilliance of the product. It is a bold move for a tech company to bring to life potential issues with its own products, but this approach and tone has paid off time and time again.

In 2019, we dramatised all the hilarious Alexa fails that didn't make the cut. The response was fantastic - it was the most viewed YouTube ad of 2019, and it was #2 spot of the Super Bowl by the public in the USA Today Ad Meter. (The NFL 100th anniversary film got the top spot - a film that featured and celebrated the legends and current stars of the very sport being watched. You can tell we aren’t bitter about it at all!)

Alexa loses her voice

In 2021, we launched our third Super Bowl film. Amazon had recently launched the new globe-shaped model of Alexa. Our film celebrated how beautiful the new Alexa device was by having a little fun imagining the outcome if she were even more attractive…more specifically, as attractive as Michael B Jordan. The response was phenomenal - it was viewed just under 80M times on YouTube (the most watched ad of 2021) , picked up the prestigious Super Clio award and gave us our 2nd Emmy nomination. 

Mind Reader

Our 2022 film asks another question - given how advanced and instinctive Alexa has become, what if she could actually read your mind? To show what would happen if Alexa’s technology really did stretch to mind reading, we enlisted celebrity mega couple Scarlett Johansson and Colin Jost. By exposing their most inner thoughts, Alexa shows them just how disastrous the consequences could be. The spot launched exclusively on Good Morning America. YouTube confirmed it as the most viewed ad of the Super Bowl and Fast Company declared it the best spot this year.