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.
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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.”