Squarespace’s journey to the Super Bowl starts with a man atop a donkey.
The web-hosting services company Thursday unveiled its return to Big Game advertising, with a tease of a 30-second ad that is expected to run between the first and second quarters of Super Bowl LIX on Fox. In a new teaser, released Thursday morning, a man on a donkey moves forward on a path, tossing laptops out of a satchel as he travels. The scene is accompanied by the sounds of uilleann pipes.
The spot will mark Squarespace’s 11th time advertising in the gridiron classic.
“Obviously it’s a huge expense, and it’s a costly thing to do every year, but, you know, some would argue it’s actually might be one of the cheaper things to do,” says David Lee, the company’s chief creative officer, of its Super Bowl marketing. “You kind of put out one silver bullet and reach a massive audience in in one shot.” He declined to discuss other details of the Squarespace ad, a common tactic from Super Bowl sponsors who want to generate interest in the weeks leading up to the game with a series of reveals.
Earlier this year, Fox was seeking at least $7 million for a 30-second ad berth in the game, buoyed by heavier-than-usual demand that led the network to get the bulk of its inventory sold by the end of August.
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Squarespace isn’t the biggest company on the Super Bowl roster, but it has, over the years, become one of the most durable. The company has tapped everyone from Adam Driver, John Malkovich, Jeff Bridges, and Zendaya to Martin Scorsese to help create its Super Bowl spots. And yet, the company has never enlisted a traditional ad agency, says Lee, choosing to stay with in-house personnel.
The company has developed some tried-and-true tactics. Squarespace aims for a quirky tone rather than the over-the-top celebrity themes many others tap. “Squarespace likes to do slightly offbeat humor,” says Lee. “When people go really loud, we tend to go really quiet.”
And it tries to place its commercial somewhere in the first half of the game, something it has done on all its Super Bowl visits except in 2021. “You find you get good traction in in that area,” he says. “It seems to be that in earlier in the game, you have more of a captive audience.”
Despite the eye-popping costs, Lee suggests there is new value in the Super Bowl. “The media landscape is quite fractured, so there aren’t a lot of opportunities where people actually enjoy watching advertising and it’s not a nuisance,” he says. “Obviously, live sports are a way to capture the mindshare of a live audience.”