Why Grubhub and Squarespace tapped the same director for the Super Bowl

Yorgos Lanthimos has directed four Oscar-nominated movies, including Bugonia, which is up for Best Picture this year. He’s amassed more than 32 wins, from the BAFTAs to the Cannes Film Festival. And as of this year, he’s also made a couple of Super Bowl ads.

On Sunday, the director is bringing his instantly recognizable and eccentric film style to hundreds of millions of Big Game viewers for the first time, working with both the food-delivery app Grubhub and website platform Squarespace.

Lanthimos has previously made ads for Gucci, Prada, and Jameson Whiskey, and he isn’t the only director to be doubling up this year: Taika Waititi is behind this year’s ads from both Pepsi and Xfinity. But the brand marketers working with Lanthimos are betting that his style and offbeat humor is the right vehicle for their brand messages at this year’s game as other marketers make more conventional creative choices.

Feast your eyes

For Grubhub’s first-ever Super Bowl ad, it tapped agency Anomaly to address the “unappetizing” issue of food-delivery fees while making the announcement that Grubhub would be doing away with them for orders over $50, Marnie Kain, VP of brand and creative, told us. Once the creative concept was developed, she said, it became clear that Lanthimos would be the best director to execute on the vision.

“We needed something that would buck convention, make the familiar seem strange, be highly watchable and funny, but in a way that really made you stop and think about what you were seeing and hearing,” Kain said. “Yorgos’s cinematic abilities, his meticulousness in the characters that he develops, and how he tells the story was really the right fit for coming out on the Super Bowl stage.”

The dinner scene depicted in the ad is reminiscent of Lanthimos’s 2018 dark historical comedy The Favourite, with lavishly (perhaps bordering on gaudily) dressed dinner party guests, who are interrupted by a character that Kain calls the “voice of reason,” played by actor and fellow Super Bowl first-timer George Clooney.

Initially, Grubhub’s team wasn’t planning to feature a celebrity, but “in the end, we collectively decided that George would bring a significant amount of gravitas,” Kain said.

The goal of the one-two punch of Lanthimos and Clooney is meant to drive broad relevance and universal appeal across all viewers, she said. By releasing a teaser and the ad ahead of the game, the hope is that some consumers will opt to order their game-day deliveries on Grubhub—and after that, continue to choose the brand over other food-delivery apps.

Even though Lanthimos was working on another Super Bowl ad, Kain said it wasn’t a concern.

“As is the case with any good director, they’re in high demand, and it’s not uncommon that directors are doing multiple campaigns at once,” she said. “He’s quite popular right now, and we are just thrilled to have him bringing our vision to life.”

Stone, alone

Squarespace’s Super Bowl ad, meanwhile, reunites Lanthimos with his longtime muse, actor Emma Stone. In its a black-and-white ad shot on film, Stone, another Super Bowl first-timer, tries unsuccessfully to regain access to a website domain of her name from a home on a desert island. The concept was inspired by Stone not owning the domain in real life, Mathieu Zarbatany, group creative director at Squarespace, told us via email, and is meant to appeal to anyone interested in starting their own website.

“Once the concept began to take shape with Emma at its center, we realized we were already subconsciously imagining it through Yorgos’s lens,” he said. “That shaped many of the creative choices we made as we were building the visual world of the campaign, even before we formally approached him or connected with Emma.”

After Stone was confirmed, Zarbatany said, she brought the idea to Lanthimos during the Bugonia press tour, which led to creative conversations between the director and the brand. Squarespace was aware that Lanthimos would be doing another ad for the Super Bowl, but Zarbatany said the team felt confident that there wouldn’t be creative overlap. Based on color grading alone, that seems to have been the case.

“Yorgos is a true artist, and each project he takes on has its own distinct voice,” Zarbatany said. “We trusted that his approach, and our story, would naturally differentiate the work.”