Instacart puts Shrek and Scooby-Doo in its Clementine launch ads

Instacart announced the campaign on 18 September, and the first spot ran during NBC’s Sunday Night Football. It is called “Turn any idea into an order”. The work introduces Clementine, the company’s shopping assistant, to customers in the United States and Canada.

Four pieces of licensed nostalgia carry the idea

The ads borrow food moments from Shrek, Scooby-Doo, The Office and A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving. Each one becomes a prompt: see the meal on screen, ask for it, get the basket. That is the whole mechanic, and it is also the product demo, which is why the licensing sits where it does.

Instacart says Clementine turns a conversation into a basket

By the company’s account, Clementine takes a chat, a list or a recipe and builds a cart from it in seconds. Instacart says it also flags promotions and cheaper alternatives and can reorder staples. The company adds that the assistant draws on 1.6 billion lifetime orders. Those are Instacart’s figures, not tested ones.

Jasmine Taylor wanted Clementine to read as warm, not clever

Jasmine Taylor, Instacart’s VP of brand marketing, said the team wanted the assistant to feel like a “warm and capable presence”. The campaign runs on linear TV, OTT, YouTube, audio, social, influencer and in-app placements.

Who picked up the work

Local Produce, Instacart’s in-house agency, made the campaign. Prettybird produced it and Brian McGinn directed. The assistant itself is not new to the industry: Instacart already offers retailers a white-label version of Clementine. Other grocery brands are working the same territory, with Co-op and VCCP mocking the weekly shop, while Mastercard expects 300 million people to shop through AI agents by 2030.

The winners in this one are easy to name. DreamWorks and Hanna-Barbera get licence fees for characters made decades ago. Prettybird and Brian McGinn get the production. Local Produce keeps a launch campaign that in another year would have gone to an outside shop, which is the part agency new-business teams should read twice.