Amazon has spent a lot of money to buy 90 seconds in this year’s Super Bowl. And it has spent a lot of money to fill that ad with celebrities – Harrison Ford, Forest Whitaker, Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson. The ad will appear during the game’s second half.

The humorous ad by Lucky Generals imagines the fails that Amazon has had experimenting with putting Alexa into gadgets. It’s funny, and in a weird way it promotes Alexa’s growing usefulness. Will it be the Super Bowl hit that rivals Amazon’s Super Bowl debut last year?

Here’s the commercial:

Hyundai is also telling an imaginative story. The brand has rounded up all of life’s little terrors, like root canal treatment, THE talk and getting the middle seat in an airplane and likened them to buying a car – without Hyundai’s Shopper Assurance program.

Hyundai’s Shopper Assurance includes flexible test drives – and cars delivered directly to consumers, more transparent pricing posted on dealer websites, and online purchasing “paperwork”. It was launched in 2017.

The engaging part of the story is that it’s set in an elevator (Jason Bateman play the elevator operator). Each floor is one of the “terrors”. Car shopping occupies the very bottom one. Like Amazon, it aims to entertain with humour. This had been a feature of Hyundai’s advertising until two years ago, when it became very serious, with an ad for a childhood cancer charity last year and a tribute to soldiers stationed overseas the year before.

The 60-second ad was created by Innocean USA and directed by Jim Jenkins through O Positive.

https://youtu.be/B5FzKB5TW0Y