ClickUp’s First Super Bowl Commercial: A Big Win from a Small Team

Melissa Rosenthal

February 3, 2022

Max 3min read

When it comes to the Super Bowl, there are 3 aspects that get people buzzing: the big game, the half-time show, and the commercials.

It’s nuts how commercials—ads that are usually seen as annoying interruptions to our content—have become as exciting to watch and talk about as the game itself. While not all of them are winners, the ones that hit the mark can go down in pop culture history.

Like, Simpsons parody level.

Budweiser frog Simpsons parody — NBC via GIPHY

As a Chief Creative Officer, making a Super Bowl commercial is a career milestone—but as a regular person who looks forward to those unpredictable tv spots as much as anyone else, my in-house team and I had one goal: to make something that made us laugh.

One major thing that sets ClickUp apart from other productivity platforms is definitely our sense of humor. Ads for work software have always been so buttoned-up, so sterile, so corporate! If our eyes are glazing over, your eyes are probably glazing over. Why not lean into the humor and relatability of everyday work struggles that can be solved with one platform?

But this is the Super Bowl, and we had to bring our A-game. Thanks to iconic workplace comedies like The Office, Parks and Recreation, and Silicon Valley, it didn’t feel like enough to just stand out by having a sense of humor about work struggles and frame ClickUp as the solution. Sure, that’s great for a YouTube ad, but this is the major leagues; risks had to be taken.

After a ton of brainstorming, we came up with a concept unlike anything we’ve ever done or seen done by competitors: “Wouldn’t life be easier throughout history if they had been using ClickUp?”

The result is a 30-second spot that brings us back to a time before the Internet—before electricity, even—that tells a viewer what ClickUp is, what it does, and who we are. And most importantly, it made us all laugh.

One of the best parts about having this small but brilliant in-house creative team of writers, directors, actors, and more is that we all can get into a room together and riff on ideas, dig into the ones we all love, polish them up, then present them around to people in other departments to make sure we’re hitting the mark outside of our little incubator.

We’re so excited to be able to present our labor of love to the biggest national stage. ClickUp’s mission as a company is to make the world more productive and save people time, and we can’t think of a better time to introduce ourselves to millions of new people than during one of the best days of the year to kick back, relax, and have fun.