SharkNinja Turns Celebrity Chaos into Entertainment-First Ads

SharkNinja’s holiday campaign is less a conventional Christmas ad and more a short mystery. Grainy security-camera clips leaked over the weekend. Kevin Hart is house-sitting for David Beckham. Tom Brady and Aryna Sabalenka drop by. Something breaks, and each star posts a video denying it was them. The full spot aired today.

Laura Dyer, SharkNinja’s senior VP of global brand and partnerships, has a simple test for the approach. An ad is “entertainment-first” if people want to share it and talk about it. Anything else, she told Digiday, is “educational.”

The teaser is the campaign

SharkNinja did not drop the ad and hope for attention. The rollout ran only two days, and Dyer says that short window is deliberate. “If you make it too long people lose a little interest.” The aim is speculation: viewers start asking what the clips are, why the stars are in Beckham’s house, and why everyone is denying it. Then the full spot lands on TV, with local versions across Italy, France, Germany and other markets under the same “there’s no home like a SharkNinja home” banner.

This is not new for the brand. When Tom Brady joined last October, a teaser made people expect a second Netflix roast. The reveal was far simpler: Brady roasting a chicken in a Ninja air fryer.

Comedy still has to carry product proof

The difficult part is that this is an appliance ad dressed as a celebrity clip show. Shoppers still need to know what the vacuum does and why it is worth the money, especially during the holidays. SharkNinja folds those answers into the scene. Hart vacuums Beckham’s home with the machine bent in the middle so it reaches under a table, a party trick that doubles as a product demonstration. Sabalenka drinks straight from the spout of a Ninja slushie machine; Brady wonders about a skincare mask.

Dyer puts it bluntly: “The product is always the hero.” The click-through from the ad does not land on a generic homepage. It lands on a page selling Hart, Beckham and Sabalenka’s favourites, connecting attention to commerce.

Why the label matters

Entertainment-first is less a new strategy than a name for what good advertising used to be before dashboards took over. Audiences now skip, scroll and pay extra to remove ads. So a brand that makes something people might watch on purpose has to say so explicitly. The label is partly an admission of how much of the rest has been tuned out.

Gary Vaynerchuk made a related point at Advertising Week New York: marketers are comfortable spending on things “fake reports justify” while being afraid to spend pennies on attention that is visibly real.

• Short teaser windows raise curiosity without wasting attention.
• Celebrity denial posts give fans a reason to follow the reveal.
• Product demos are hidden inside the comedy, not bolted on.
• Click-throughs go to a shoppable page, not a generic brand story.

SharkNinja produced the campaign in-house through its Creative Studios, working directly with each celebrity’s team. Last year’s neighbourhood spot involved HartBeat; this time Dyer says the team did “pretty much all of it by ourselves.” Creators are not excluded. They will be seeded with the campaign through the season, and their kitchen-filmed SharkNinja videos inspired the idea.

The real aim is old-fashioned. Dyer wants people to turn to someone and say, “this is so funny, you should watch it.” That reaction has always been the point. It just now needs a label.

Source: Digiday