Good ads have a new name, ‘entertainment-first’ and SharkNinja is using it for its holiday campaign

The evidence started leaking on social media over the weekend as grainy security camera footage. In the the full spot, out today, Sabalenka drinks straight from the spout of a Ninja slushie machine. Brady wonders about one of the company’s skincare face masks and treads on a present, while Hart cracks a picture frame with a Shark vacuum. Beckham watches the whole thing on his phone live from his own security cameras.

Asked what makes that entertainment-first, Laura Dyer, senior vp of global brand and partnerships at SharkNinja, said it comes down to whether people want to share the ad and talk about it. Anything else is “educational”. That’s a test most memorable advertising has always passed. The fact that marketers now feel obliged to give it a name says something about where the industry has ended up. After years of ads built to satisfy a performance dashboard, making something people would choose to watch has become a position a brand has to declare. 

SharkNinja has run this play before. When Brady joined last October, a teaser had the internet expecting a second Netflix roast before the reveal: he was roasting a chicken in a Ninja air fryer. The holiday campaign runs the same trick with a bigger cast and a Christmas tree.

Leaked “CCTV” clips and denial videos from the stars started going up on their accounts and SharkNinja’s at the start of the month two days before the full spot aired today. 

“If you make it too long people lose a little interest,” said Dyer on the decision to make the ad’s rollout short. The point is to get people guessing, she continued. “We want people to start speculating, asking ‘what is this from SharkNinja? Where are they? Why are they denying being in David Beckham’s house?’,” Dyer added. Once the spot drops it goes to TV while local brand ambassadors in Italy, France, Germany and other markets will run their own versions under the same “there’s no home like a SharkNinja home” banner, with extensions running through to the end of the year. 

The trickier part is that this is still an ad for appliances however it’s dressed up. Somebody still has to tell shoppers what the vacuum does and why it’s worth the money, and the holiday shopping season is when that matters most for businesses like SharkNinja. Dyer and her team tucked those answers into the ads themselves. For instance, Hart vacuums Beckham’s house with the machine bent in the middle so it reaches under a table, a SharkNinja party trick. 

“The product is always the hero,” said Dyer. Indeed, the campaign will be judged on sales as much as brand equity so those details matter. Anyone who clicks through from the ad lands on a homepage selling Hart, Beckham and Sabalenka’s favorites. 

For a brand that has spent the year being held up as a creator marketing case study, putting Beckham, Hart and Brady at the top of its holiday push is an unexpected call. Dyer called it a matter of fit. “I wouldn’t say it’s conscious at the exclusion of content creators,” she said. The creators haven’t gone anywhere either. They’ll be seeded with the campaign through the season and their videos of kitchens crammed with SharkNinja kit gave the team the idea in the first place. 

SharkNinja made the spot without an agency. Its in-house team Creative Studios wrote and produced it while also working directly with each celebrity’s team. The in-house team also made last year’s neighbourhood spot, though that one was done in close partnership with HartBeat — Hart’s own production company. This time SharkNinja did “pretty much all of it by ourselves” Dyer said. That isn’t necessarily a sign of things to come, to be clear. If an agency makes sense, SharkNinja will hire one, she continued, and if it doesn’t the company is happy to do it itself because “our team is talented,” Dyer added. 

Beneath the celebs, social media rollout and creators is an ambition the ad business has chased since the jingle.

Dyer described the ideal reaction as people turning to reach others and saying, “this is so funny, you should watch it.” Nobody had to brand that strategy when there were three channels and the ad break was the only way back to the programme. Audiences now skip, scroll and pay extra to get rid of ads so a brand making something people might watch on purpose has to say so out loud. Calling it entertainment-first is mostly an admission of how much of the rest people have learned to ignore. The point rang throughout Advertising Week New York last month.

“Oftentimes we are incredibly comfortable in our industry to waste quadrillions of dollars on things that fake reports justify, though everyone in this room knows it is garbage, “said Gary Vaynerchuk, CEO and chairman at VaynerX. “We are petrified to spend some pennies on something that everyone in this room knows is happening and is real, yet we don’t have the corporate reporting internally yet to justify what’s actually happening.”