Yahoo Lifestyle Matthew McConaughey Drives Uber Eats Into Super Bowl Commercial Competition
Uber Eats is counting on a dizzying array of Matthew McConaugheys to help it make a Super Bowl splash in an ad game that counts two of its many competitors as advertisers.
The transportation and delivery company has crafted a rapid-fire ad in which the actor takes on many different roles across multiple eras to demonstrate that “football is a conspiracy to make us hungry.” Kevin Bacon, Peyton Manning, Martha Stewart, Greta Gerwig and Charli XCX are among the guests who turn up at various points in the commercial.
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“It was a lot of different scenes, a lot of set changes,” acknowledges Georgie Jeffreys, head of marketing for Uber. McConaughey, who plays characters in several different time periods as ;’really invested.”
So too is Uber, which faces a Super Bowl that will also feature ads from rivals DoorDash and Instacart. The company sees its food delivery service as an integral part of its business. Touting it during the Super Bowl, says Jeffreys, will “cement our partnership with the NFL, which is always pretty critical for us.”
Uber has fast become an expected part of the Super Bowl advertising circus and its commercial on Sunday, February 9 will mark its fifth time as part of the event’s sponsorship roster.
In the past, the company has run ads heavy on celebrity but with an interesting hook. Gwyneth Paltrow, Trevor Noah, Jennifer Coolidge and Nicholas Braun all took part in a new 30-second ad in 2022, that showed them dining on a host of non-food items that were sculpted out of vegan chocolate.
As in past years, Uber’s Super Bowl spot is just the beginning of its marketing efforts. “We really strongly believe that to do the Super Bowl required that you do more than just the spot,” says Jeffreys. “We really believe in capitalizing on the moment and the campaign and the anticipation. We call it having lots of tentacles.” Uber has teamed up with Martha Stewart, for example, to sell her version of the classic Cesar salad, which enjoyed a brief presence in the Super Bowl ad. There will also be what Jeffreys says is “a pretty exciting media stunt” around Caesar’s Superdome, home to the big event.
This year’s commercial was more challenging than what Uber has done in years past. The shoot was “pretty demanding and pretty long and it was a different level of complexity than we had previously done,” Jeffreys acknowledges, but “there were a lot of really special moments.”
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