Aisha Hakim didn’t go to ad school. She got into advertising because her dad had a friend who worked at INNOCEAN. She showed up for an informational interview with a portfolio of ads she’d designed for her town’s local newspaper—Taco Tuesday specials, hotel bar promos, that sort of thing. The creative directors told her she was “a hustler” and brought her on as a permalancer.
For years, she made retail banners and dealership toppers while watching the brand creatives do the work she wanted to be doing. Then one day, sitting in an airport, she saw a spot play out in her head. She typed it up and sent it to her creative director. His response: “This doesn’t suck. Let me find you a writer.”
That script—conceived by a permalancer who’d never written one before and her partner Matt Lee—beat every senior team in the department. It became Hyundai’s 2014 Super Bowl commercial for the Elantra, titled “Nice.” It starred Johnny Galecki, featured Richard Lewis and aired during Super Bowl XLVIII to an audience of over 100 million people. She was 25.
On the latest episode of The Super Duper Show, the podcast from Murder Hornet that breaks the NDAs behind big game spots, Hakim sat down with host Tyler Pierce (ECD, Murder Hornet) and co-host Nicole James (freelance creative director) to tell the full story—from typing that first script to crying in an edit bay bathroom.
How a permalancer landed a Super Bowl brief
INNOCEAN was running a jump ball brief for the Super Bowl. The entire department was competing—not just teams, but creative directors too. Nobody was thinking about the retail permalancer. But Hakim and Lee wrote their concept anyway: two bros pull up next to each other in matching Elantras and launch into a one-upsmanship battle. “We were basically just writing what we thought was funny,” Hakim says. “This was probably not our favorite idea, but it had two cars. And that was really influential to the client.”
The spot went all the way up to Hyundai’s leadership in Korea. When the call came that her script had been picked, Hakim was in her bedroom. “My project manager called me and said, your spot got picked. And I cried. And I’ve been chasing that high ever since.”
From bros to a love story (and losing the billy goat)
The original concept was written for Aziz Ansari and Jay Baruchel—two guys riffing on each other’s cars. But director Jim Jenkins, who’d helmed more than 20 Super Bowl spots by that point, had a different vision. “He said, I think it works better as a love story,” Hakim recalls. The bro comedy became a flirtatious chase between Galecki and an unknown actress Jenkins handpicked for the role.
Hakim and Lee went through 50 to 100 iterations of rhyming dialog, trying to work in vehicle features without killing the fun. “I remember being really upset that we didn’t get the billy goat,” Hakim says. “I really wanted the billy goat.” She was 25.
Gary Shandling got a cosmetic procedure. Richard Lewis showed up the next day.
The spot was originally supposed to feature Gary Shandling in the passenger seat—“Nice Shandling” was the line. But Shandling got a cosmetic procedure that didn’t go well and had to drop out the day before the shoot. The team scrambled. Richard Lewis, known for his rambling comedic style, was in LA. They called. He said yes. He showed up the next morning. “Nice rambling” replaced “Nice Shandling” and the spot kept moving.
Meanwhile, Hakim had laryngitis. Her producer was eight and a half months pregnant. And at one point, someone mistook Hakim for a PA and told her to go get coffees. “I was like, oh—this is my spot,” she says.
The first edit that made her cry
Post-production at Arcade Edit was Hakim’s crash course in the gap between imagination and rough cuts. “I remember seeing the rough cut and walking out of the door and going into the bathroom and crying because I was like, it sucks, and everyone’s gonna see it, and my life is over,” she says.
VFX wasn’t done. The music wasn’t right. (The team wanted Run DMC’s “It’s Tricky” but wound up with ELO’s “Evil Woman”—a choice driven by the CDs, who were, as Hakim puts it, “men in their 50s.”) The creative directors even brought in a senior ACD team to take a fresh look at the edit. At the time, it felt like failure. Looking back, Hakim sees it differently: “Now I think that’s a fantastic exercise. I’m always in favor of blowing things up just to see.”
James offered perspective from the co-host seat: “I’ve never met a first edit that I liked. I will not like whatever the first edit you’re going to send me. I just know that about myself now.”
Naivete as superpower
Galecki alone cost $500,000. The total production budget was likely north of $20 million. But Hakim and Lee never thought about any of that. “I didn’t even think we thought about the budget,” Hakim says. “I didn’t think we thought about any of that stuff.”
That ignorance, she now believes, was the thing that let her stumble into it. “I had a bit of naivete that helped me, because I didn’t expect anything from it,” she says. “When I went into it with complete lack of fear for the process or the gauntlet that was about to approach me, I just sort of stumbled into it.”
The spot earned a B rating from Super Bowl ad trackers—strong for any team, remarkable for a permalancer’s first script. It launched Hakim’s career, sending her to Venables Bell & Partners to work on Audi, then to 72andSunny and beyond. She’s now a freelance creative director teaching at Denver Ad School.
But the conversation kept circling back to a bigger concern: the junior creative pipeline that made stories like hers possible is disappearing. “I do think we’re losing that,” Hakim says. “We’re hiring less junior talent. I just think we’re losing that a little bit.”
James agreed: “We all benefited from that system. I think it’s important that we feed back into it. If you’re not feeding the next generation of people, there’s not going to be anyone to make the work.”
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