The hook. John Adams is about to lose the Declaration of Independence in a mountain of parchment. Then someone opens ClickUp. That is the whole sketch: a period drama, played completely straight, rescued by project management software. It aired in the third quarter of Super Bowl LVI on February 13, 2022, ClickUp's first Super Bowl spot.
Why it works. Most B2B software ads explain features. This one dramatizes the problem instead: your work is scattered everywhere, and it has been since 1776. The costumes are accurate, the actors are unknowns, and nobody winks at the camera, so the anachronism carries the entire joke. ClickUp's in-house team, led by chief creative officer Melissa Rosenthal, deliberately skipped celebrities so the product stayed the hero. The gap between quill-and-candle chaos and one clean app makes the value proposition land without a single feature list. Filming took five hours. The premise did the heavy lifting.
Steal this. Take the oldest, most familiar scene of work you can find and drop your product into it. Play the period straight and let the anachronism be the only joke; the moment you add a second gag, the sketch collapses. And if your product is the punchline, do not hire a famous face to compete with it.
Ad by ClickUp's in-house creative team. Watch it on ClickUp's YouTube channel and read the reveal on ClickUp's blog.