Ben Stiller and Benson Boone Flip for Instacart’s Bananas in Its 2026 Super Bowl 60 Ad

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.

In the future, the company plans to roll it out on more items that people frequently have strong preferences for, like avocados and deli meat.

As the preference picker tool was being developed, it became the perfect message for Instacart’s Super Bowl ad, Jones said. It’s simple enough to communicate playfully in a 30-second ad, and it represents a relatable point of consumer friction when ordering groceries through an app.

By recruiting Stiller and Boone to star in the spot, Jones said the brand hopes to reach a wide swath of consumers, from Gen Z fans of the pop star to the folks who remember Stiller’s early work in the 1980s. Stiller brought in award-winning director Spike Jonze, who in turn recruited Oscar-nominated director of photography Autumn Durand.

“Spike Jonze is one of our great directors, so working with him was a dream,” Stiller said in a statement. “Benson is insanely talented, both as a dancer, singer, athlete, and now actor. The whole thing was so much fun.”

In addition to the 30-second ad that’ll run in the game, Instacart also released a 150-second director’s cut online. There is also a social campaign asking people to weigh in on whether underripe or overripe bananas are better, if those are the only options, Jones said.

“The hope is [the Super Bowl spot] piques your curiosity, and then it kind of all makes sense as you get exposed to more and more of the campaign,” Jones explained.

Instacart’s in-house agency Local Produce worked on the campaign with an external agency team that was formerly part of FCB, one of the IPG agencies that was dissolved as a result of the Omnicom takeover. The team remained together to work on the campaign, but now represents McCann and BBDO.

While it may look on the surface like Instacart is facing major competition on the Super Bowl 60 stage with food delivery apps Grubhub and Uber Eats also advertising in the Big Game, it’s actually in cahoots with both. Uber Eats has been using Instacart’s retail media ad-serving technology since April, and Instacart embeds Uber Eats’ restaurant delivery into its app, Jones said. Grubhub also partners with Instacart to give users access to grocery delivery through its platform. DoorDash, category leader in the restaurant-delivery space, is sitting this year out.

Jones, who spent six years at Uber prior to joining Instacart, acknowledged the value of some friendly competition with her former company. She noted the entertainment value of the work that Uber has produced for the last several years, saying that “it raises the bar for all of us.”

Still, nobody does their best work when looking over their shoulder, she said.

“We have a very distinct, very valuable customer base,” Jones said. “We are the experts in online grocery and that’s ours to own, so let’s own it.”