This was one of the most interesting visits on the trip I had, and I wanted to share! Meeting the creatives behind the #NotATideAd ad kind of felt like meeting celebrities. On Wednesday, a few students and I were lucky enough to visit Saatchi & Saatchi NY, the agency responsible for the famous “Not a Tide Ad” commercials during the 2018 Super Bowl, featuring David Harbour, the cop from Stranger Things, as well as the Old Spice guy,  Mr. Clean, and many others. The creatives behind it were modest about the success of their work, but they were beaming with pride. That day, they were celebrating the rare win of a Black Pencil for this Tide Ad. They talked about how the brief for this year’s Tide Ad was literally “beat last years Tide Super Bowl commercial,” which was going to be a seemingly impossible feat—the previous years’ Tide Ad got tons of recognition and impressions after its debut. They talked about the immense pressure they felt to do something better than last year.

The hardest part for them was coming up with that one great idea to build the campaign off of. In the past Tide commercials had always focused on “that one pesky stain” that only Tide could remove. They needed to break that pattern of focusing on “the stain.” That’s when they came up with the big idea: “every ad is a Tide ad,” an insight that was born from the idea that maybe there are just no stains to begin with. This insight, they said, took over 2 months to reach. How treacherous of a time it must have been to get to that point! Once they reached, they said, the process had never been easier. The campaign and the possibilities within it continued to grow and strengthen, like with the addition of characters from other brands like Mr. Clean and OldSpice. It was a huge success, and #NotaTideAd was number #1 trending on twitter above #2, #SuperBowl.

-Audrey Weatherhead