• by J. Max Robins , Featured Columnist, January 29, 2015

The duo of Squarespace and Jeff Bridges have teamed up for a Super Bowl spot that will carry over into a multiplatform branding partnership where seemingly everyone wins, even thousands of kids who go to bed without enough to eat.

Squarespace has been burnishing its image as the Web publishing platform for passionate, creative iconoclasts for the last several months. It makes sense the brand would go all-Super Bowl with the Oscar-winning Bridges -- this is “The Big Lebowski”’s legendary Dude, after all -- for such a major marketing push.

The Squarespace/Bridges collaboration is built on a Super Bowl spot  in which the actor -- who seems to be channeling the Zen-master-mode title role he played in  “The Giver  -- gently touts his  “Jeff Bridges Sleeping  Tapes,” which he's selling on his Squarespace-powered website.  Bridges says all proceeds from purchases  of his meditative music will go to the charity No Kids Hungry, the nonprofit he's been the spokesman for since 2010.   In the spot, there's even a  sample of Bridges’ dreamscape recordings, with the actor playing a taste of what's in store on his recorder.

Squarespace founder and CEO Anthony Casalena says he wanted the spot to embody his company's mission to show that “any idea, no matter how wild or weird, could be represented beautifully and  meaningfully through Squarespace.”   This isn't simply a star-driven Super Bowl commercial where the brand pays $4.5 million to raise brand awareness and stroke corporate egos.  According to Casalena (and I concur), the campaign demonstrates how its platform can serve the masses and still be tailored to an individual's creative needs.

The spot is in the tradition of a terrific short film that Squarespace distributed last October on YouTube and elsewhere featuring extreme rock climber Alex Honnold. Used to introduce the latest iteration of its platform, it helped position Squarespace as a creative company as well as a technology one.

The Squarespace/Bridges campaign works in a similar way, plus brings the halo effect of the No Kids Hungry effort.  Bridges has said that collaborating with Squarespace on DreamingwithJeff.com allowed him to “take a seed of an idea and make it come alive in a beautiful way. “

Wieden+Kennedy is the agency behind the campaign  “At its core, the campaign is a product demonstration,” says David Kolbusz,, executive creative director of Wieden+Kennedy New York, noting that the campaign display both Squarespace's design capabilities  and its ecommerce features.

Kolbusz summed up the effort and what I think sets it apart from much of what will see on Super Bowl Sunday: It shows an advertiser with an “idea that seemed a bit odd, and turns it into something real and meaningful.”