How bubly Made Michael Bublé Its Accidental Spokesman at Super Bowl LIII
bubly's "Michael Bublé vs bubly" campaign is a 30-second Super Bowl LIII commercial, created by Goodby Silverstein & Partners and aired on February 3, 2019 in the United States, in which Canadian singer Michael Bublé insists the PepsiCo sparkling water brand was named after him and repeatedly alters cans with a marker to replace the brand name with his own.
PepsiCo launched bubly in the United States in February 2018. By January 2019, the brand had gained enough retail traction that PepsiCo publicly announced on January 17, 2019, per pepsico.com, that bubly was on track to exceed one hundred million dollars in first-year retail sales — a milestone that gave the Super Bowl campaign genuine commercial weight beyond its entertainment value. The 30-second spot, formally unveiled on January 31, 2019 as reported by adweek.com, gave bubly a cultural platform proportional to that commercial ambition.
The campaign's central mechanic is deceptively simple. Michael Bublé encounters bubly sparkling water in a store setting, becomes convinced the brand was named in his honour, and proceeds to correct cans, argue with store staff, and assert ownership of the name throughout the spot. Comedian Aparna Nancherla appears as a store manager, and a child also features in the commercial, as reported by The Drum, grounding the absurdist premise in recognisable retail environments. The Clapboard Score for this campaign is 66 out of 100. The campaign ran in the United States and included a branded sponsorship of The Ellen DeGeneres Show in the weeks surrounding the Super Bowl, extending the name-confusion joke beyond the single broadcast moment and into daytime television territory across the US market.
bubly entered a fiercely contested category. In the United States, sparkling water retail sales reached approximately two and a half billion dollars in 2019, up over sixteen percent year over year as of mid-2019, according to bloomberg.com. Flavored sparkling water volume growth reached over twenty-one percent in the same period, per bevnet.com, signalling that the category was expanding rapidly but also attracting intensifying competition.
LaCroix and Spindrift represented the two most established independent challengers in the US flavored sparkling water segment, with LaCroix in particular having built a loyal millennial following through social media and minimalist branding in the years before bubly's arrival. PepsiCo's strategic response was to sidestep the functional-purity positioning that competitors favoured and anchor bubly instead around personality, flavour range, and playful brand voice. Per pepsico.com, bubly was positioned from launch with the tagline "full of flavor and personalité," signalling that irreverence was a designed brand attribute rather than an afterthought.
Choosing Goodby Silverstein & Partners to develop the Super Bowl campaign aligned with that personality-first brief. The agency is recognised for comedy-forward brand storytelling, and the Michael Bublé concept delivered exactly the kind of earned media amplification that a challenger brand entering its second year in the United States needed. The name coincidence between Michael Bublé and bubly was not manufactured for the campaign. As reported by forbes.com, Bublé himself had not heard of the brand before being approached, making the premise feel genuinely discovered rather than constructed. That authenticity gave the joke structural credibility and made the Super Bowl spot resistant to the cynicism that often greets celebrity endorsements in the food and drink category.
Harold Einstein directed the "Michael Bublé vs bubly" commercial. Einstein is a director with a track record in comedic advertising, and his approach to the spot relies on performance timing and tonal restraint rather than visual spectacle — a considered choice for a premise that lives or dies on whether Michael Bublé's conviction feels genuine.
The creative execution built the joke across a series of escalating encounters within a single retail environment. Bublé does not wink at the camera or acknowledge the absurdity of his position. He plays the misapprehension completely straight, which is the primary source of the comedy. When he uncaps a marker and physically rewrites bubly cans to read "Bublé," the action functions as a visual punchline that required no dialogue to land — a craft decision that respects the compressed timeline of a 30-second Super Bowl format.
Casting Aparna Nancherla as the store manager introduced a second comedic register: deadpan disbelief counterbalancing Bublé's enthusiastic self-assurance. As reported by thedrum.com, the ad's ensemble approach — Nancherla, a child, and additional store characters — gave the premise room to breathe across its half-minute runtime without relying solely on Bublé's star presence. Michael Bublé himself described the experience to adweek.com as "making fun of the name," framing the concept in the plainest possible terms, which reinforces how cleanly the creative idea translated from brief to screen. The campaign's visual identity remained consistent with bubly's established pastel-and-smile packaging system, ensuring that even viewers unfamiliar with the brand could identify the product category and brand personality within the first few seconds of the spot. Goodby Silverstein & Partners maintained brand coherence while allowing the celebrity premise to drive awareness.
No verified performance data for the "Michael Bublé vs bubly" campaign is publicly available in terms of sales lift, brand recall scores, or post-Super Bowl share movement directly attributable to the spot. What the available record does establish is the commercial context in which the campaign operated and the structural factors that indicate effectiveness.
PepsiCo had already stated publicly, per pepsico.com, that bubly was on track to exceed one hundred million dollars in first-year retail sales before the Super Bowl aired. That pre-existing commercial trajectory meant the Super Bowl campaign was not being asked to rescue a struggling brand but to accelerate one that was already performing. In that context, the choice of a high-visibility, high-entertainment-value spot during Super Bowl LIII — one of the most-watched annual broadcasts in the United States — reflects confidence in the brand's momentum rather than a defensive spend.
Structurally, the campaign demonstrates several attributes associated with durable advertising effectiveness. The core joke is instantly communicable and requires no category knowledge to understand, lowering the barrier for non-sparkling-water consumers to engage. The earned media component — Michael Bublé's own public statements, as captured by adweek.com and forbes.com, describing the campaign as his "very first Super Bowl commercial" — extended reach beyond the paid broadcast window. The Ellen DeGeneres Show sponsorship further embedded the name-confusion premise into a daytime context that skews toward the brand's core grocery-purchasing demographic in the United States. The Clapboard Score of 66 out of 100 reflects a campaign that executes its comic concept cleanly but operates within a relatively narrow creative register.
The bubly Super Bowl commercial features Michael Bublé insisting the sparkling water brand was named after him. Created by Goodby Silverstein & Partners and aired during Super Bowl LIII on February 3, 2019 in the United States, the 30-second spot shows Bublé relabelling cans and arguing with store staff, including comedian Aparna Nancherla.
Harold Einstein directed the bubly Super Bowl LIII commercial. Einstein's direction leaned on straight-faced performance and escalating comedic encounters within a single retail setting, allowing Michael Bublé's deadpan conviction to carry the joke across the 30-second format created by Goodby Silverstein & Partners.
PepsiCo launched bubly in the United States in February 2018. By January 2019, per pepsico.com, the brand was on track to exceed one hundred million dollars in first-year retail sales, establishing meaningful commercial momentum before the Super Bowl LIII campaign aired in February 2019.
Michael Bublé had not heard of bubly before being approached for the campaign, according to forbes.com. That genuine unfamiliarity gave the name-confusion premise structural credibility, distinguishing the spot from constructed celebrity endorsements and making the joke feel discovered rather than manufactured for Super Bowl LIII.
Goodby Silverstein & Partners created the bubly Super Bowl LIII campaign. The San Francisco-based agency developed the "Michael Bublé vs bubly" concept, building on the brand's established personality-first positioning that PepsiCo had set at bubly's United States launch in February 2018.
The bubly "Michael Bublé vs bubly" campaign receives a Clapboard Score of 66 out of 100. The score reflects clean comedic execution and a strongly communicable central premise, while acknowledging that the campaign's creative range remains relatively contained within its single name-confusion joke.
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