Little Caesars ad with Rainn Wilson is Durham ad agency’s third trip to the Super Bowl
A well-known American idiom and an iconic TV character are at the center of the first Little Caesars Super Bowl commercial, which was created by a Durham-based advertising agency and aired Sunday during Super Bowl LIV.
McKinney, which has offices in the American Tobacco Campus as well as in Los Angeles and New York, was chosen by Little Caesars to create advertising for its new delivery service, a first for the country’s third-largest pizza chain.
Little Caesars pizza delivery, according to the 30-second commercial featuring Rainn Wilson of “The Office,” is “the best thing since sliced bread.”
“The process was an interesting one and somewhat unusual by the normal standards,” said McKinney chief creative officer Jonathan Cude in an interview.
McKinney was one of several companies pitching ideas for the Little Caesars commercial. One of the ideas in their pitch ended up being the most liked and was ultimately created as a commercial, which doesn’t usually happen.
“It was one of several ideas that we took into the pitch and it ended up actually making it through to production,” said Cude.
The commercial aired during the third quarter of Super Bowl LIV between the San Francisco 49ers and the Kansas City Chiefs.
The slapstick comedy commercial features Wilson, known for playing Dwight Schrute in “The Office,” as the CEO of a Silicon Valley-esque company called “Sliced Bread Inc.”
Upon finding that Little Caesars delivery means that sliced bread is, in fact, no longer the best thing, the company faces disaster, goes under, and chaotic hilarity ensues.
Cude said Wilson was at the top of their list of potential stars.
“There’s an association with the sort of attitude and demeanor of that character,” Cude said. “Then drafting off of that, but putting him in a new role, we felt like [...] you could see a character like that rising to the top of something as insane as a sliced bread company.”
Using a tech startup environment for the commercial in a humorous way is something that Cude thinks audiences can recognize and understand, and in turn, laugh at.
The Little Caesars commercial is the centerpiece of a larger ad campaign that McKinney is spearheading, including a 63-second version of the commercial.
“McKinney was the perfect partner in helping us take this message to market,” said Tina Orozco, communications director for Little Caesars. “They have demonstrated incredible depth with their strategy, which is ultimately why they were chosen as our agency.”
The commercial, shot in Los Angeles earlier this month, is McKinney’s third Super Bowl endeavor. They produced a Nationwide Insurance commercial in 2015 with Mindy Kaling, another star from “The Office,” and a Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines commercial in 1998.
This story was originally published January 31, 2020 at 2:59 PM.
