The Super Bowl's winning ad is ingeniously recursive

In the wake of the Super Bowl, the internet is in love with Tide laundry detergent. Here's why:

People are praising "It's a Tide Ad" for all sorts of reasons. It's high-fidelity parody, and very funny. It's tricky and meta, making Tide seem smart and woke. It's repetitive and simple, so even when viewers are initially faked out, they feel like they're in on the joke. Apparently the featured actor is beloved from Stranger Things, but I haven't seen the show and it didn't detract from my appreciation of the conceit.

The original spot above aired in the first quarter and was followed up with a 15-second reminder in every quarter thereafter, in ads that initially appear to be for something else. Adweek called out "multiple spots" as the top trend in Super Bowl advertising overall, noting that "Rote repetition is important now more than ever." "Even the voice-overs that brought people back into the game after breaks kept the joke going," echoed the Washington Post: "'Brought to you by Tide. And Tide. And Tide. And Tide.'"

But fundamentally, it is recursion, not repetition, that makes this campaign such a success: by embedding every other ad in a Tide ad, Tide embeds itself in every other ad--until, as the ad itself suggests, "Every ad is a Tide Ad."

Recursion is inherently complex, and it's fiendishly clever of P&G and Saatchi & Saatchi to have made a recursive message so simple. So clever, even, that you almost forget how well it's working. It's hard to pinpoint the precise moment when that subtle shift happens and, expecting to be faked out by a Tide Ad, you instead mistake another ad for Tide.

Now their ad is embedded, for free, all over the internet, even in this little corner here. I've been thinking about laundry detergent for two days.

(It's worth noting that P&G is a famous case study--one I reference in my day job with some regularity--of a traditional organization transforming itself into a design-thinking led company to foster innovation. I'm not surprised to see them behind a such a clever campaign.)