In 2018, Tide didn’t run a Super Bowl ad. It ran all of them. The campaign — “It’s a Tide Ad” — hijacked every commercial break, turned David Harbour into a laundry spokesman and convinced millions of viewers that every clean shirt on screen was proof of Tide’s dominance. It won a Grand Prix, a Titanium Lion, a D&AD Black Pencil and a shelf full of One Show gold. Seven years later, agencies still get briefed to replicate it. On the latest episode of Murder Hornet’s The Super Duper Show, Maddy Kramer — one of the creatives behind the campaign — sat down with host Tyler Pierce and co-host Bharat Kumar, SVP and ECD at Momentum Worldwide, to tell the full story. It involves a product stat nobody noticed, a casting suggestion from a teenager and a team that funded their own trip to the Palais.
The number buried at the bottom of the brief
The brief from Tide landed at Saatchi & Saatchi New York in August 2017, under CCO Javier Campopiano. The mandate was blunt: the year before, the brand had hijacked the live broadcast with the Roger Stain spot and won 14 buy-ons. Now they wanted something bigger. For months, the creative team circled without landing. Then someone noticed a stat buried deep in the brief — Tide’s household penetration sat at roughly 85%. “That’s how the insight came about,” Kramer says. “Everyone has a Tide bottle in their house. That means everything needs to be cleaned by Tide.” The idea was sold the week before Thanksgiving. They shot it the second week of January.
The CCO’s daughter picked the star
The team wanted a Don Draper type. Jon Hamm was on the wish list. So was Jeff Goldblum. But by late November, most big-name talent had already signed Super Bowl deals, and budget was tight. Then the CCO’s daughter — watching the first season of Stranger Things — suggested David Harbour. He wasn’t a commercial actor. In fact, Kramer believes “It’s a Tide Ad” was his first commercial ever. “It felt like the right person,” she says. “He was growing. He wasn’t as big as he is today.” The casting came down to timing, availability and a teenager’s instinct.
Tide Pods changed the script — literally
Production moved fast. Traktor directed. Pico created the music. Arcade’s Jeff edited across three simultaneous rooms with nearly 10 creatives rotating through. But the Tide Pods challenge — where people filmed themselves eating the detergent packets — forced a late-stage pivot. Every eating scene was pulled from the final cut. “We took away all the eating scenes out of the commercial,” Kramer recalls. Some were never even shot. Others were rewritten on set in LA while the New York team scrambled to fill the gaps. Visual effects added another layer of complexity — the bottle animation, the double horse, the seamless genre transitions — and at least one team member slept at the edit facility in the final days before shipping.
The night it aired, nobody knew what was coming next
The media plan was robust — a 60-second anchor spot, back-to-back 15-second genre spoofs, quarter bumpers and a social war room — but the team had no control over what aired around them. They didn’t know if a Budweiser spot would run right before their beer parody. “We have no idea what’s coming before or after,” Kramer says. “It was a leap of faith.” The first spot split audiences. The second one landed. By the third, the gag was undeniable. That night, Kramer saw a headline — she thinks it was the Washington Post or the New York Times — declaring Tide the winner of the Super Bowl. “That’s when we could breathe.”
They paid their own way to Cannes
Here’s a detail that doesn’t make it into most case studies: Publicis Groupe had decided not to send work to Cannes that year. The client overruled them and submitted anyway. And the creatives? “Each of us decided to go on our own dime,” Kramer says. Account, strategy, production — nearly the entire team bought their own tickets because they believed in the work. Only one creative couldn’t make it. He’d had a baby. Everyone else showed up at the Palais and watched it win together.
Great work doesn’t always open the doors you expect
Kramer left Saatchi about nine months after the campaign. The CCO departed first. The team scattered — to new agencies, new countries, new chapters. Kramer went to Anomaly, then Edelman, then Dentsu. But here’s the part she’s transparent about: despite being part of one of the most decorated campaigns in Super Bowl history, the opportunities didn’t always follow the way she expected. “I cannot be the only creative — and even female creative — that was feeling that way,” she says. So she built Invisible Creatives, a database that grew to nearly 2,000 portfolios spotlighting female talent worldwide. She was named Next Creative Leader by the One Show in 2018. Adweek called her a Trailblazer. She’s since produced The Last Generation, a podcast preserving stories from Holocaust survivors and their grandchildren, and is launching Madam President, a studio housing her growing roster of purpose-driven side projects. The work after the work, it turns out, is where the real story lives.
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