Ben Stiller and Benson Boone are bringing a retro, over-the-top energy to Instacart’s 2026 Super Bowl ad.
The grocery delivery app’s return to the Super Bowl follows last year’s better-than-expected debut, said chief marketing officer Laura Jones in a statement. The 2025 ad featuring a gaggle of brand mascots like Chester Cheetah and the Kool-Aid Man “propelled our business forward,” she said.
This year, Instacart’s using a more traditional Big Game playbook, enlisting celebrities to play out an absurdist narrative—all while communicating a key part of how the app tries to differentiate itself from competitors.
“Instacart lets you choose your bananas,” Boone sings in a sky-high falsetto, dancing in step alongside Stiller in skin-tight, matching disco suits for the 30-second Super Bowl spot, which will air in the first quarter of NBC’s broadcast of the game on Feb. 8.
When the younger member of the fictional duo can’t resist throwing his signature onstage Gainer flip, the older insists upon following suit. It doesn’t end well.
“Working on a Super Bowl commercial for Instacart blew my mind,” Boone said in a statement. “However, adding Ben Stiller to the equation… diabolical.”
The acrobatics are just a bit of absurd humor to land the bit, though. The real message is all about Instacart’s new “preference picker” tool. You really can pick your bananas.
“One thing that we see as a real barrier is around trust and quality,” Jones told ADWEEK. “When you go to the grocery store yourself, you get to choose the cut of meat or the exact banana that you want. People wonder, am I going to be giving that up if I use [a delivery app]?”
Instacart users have long been able to leave notes for the shoppers collecting their items in stores, adding preferences for things like ripeness. But when the delivery app realized how frequently people were using those notes—people have written 32 million shopper notes about bananas alone—they decided to simplify the process for sharing those preferences.
Instacart began testing the preference picker earlier this month. Fifty percent of Instacart users have access to the tool, and it will be fully rolled out by Feb. 8, Jones said. While officially dubbed the preference picker, the tool is affectionately referred to as the “banana slider” internally, she said, which prompts people to choose exactly how they’d like their bananas—from hard and green to yellow and freckled.
