How Squarespace and Idris Elba Made Dreaming a Brand Strategy
Squarespace's 'Dream It with Idris Elba' is a 2019 cinematic brand campaign, produced in-house and directed by Spike Jonze, that follows the actor imagining himself across five alternative careers — fashion designer, boxer, fighter pilot, baker, and astronaut — set to a live choral rendition of 'Que Será, Será', released ahead of Super Bowl LIII in the United States.
The campaign launched on January 30, 2019, timed to maximise cultural reach in the days before Super Bowl LIII, one of the highest-profile advertising moments in the United States calendar. Squarespace produced the work in-house rather than through an external advertising agency, according to musebyclios.com, marking a notable production choice for a brand of its scale. The campaign comprised two connected films: 'Dream It', which captured Elba's imagined transformations, and 'Make It', a companion mockumentary-style piece in which Elba and comedian Lolly Adefope build a Squarespace website for his real apparel line, 2HR SET, according to squarespace.com.
Shot in East London near Idris Elba's hometown, according to shots.net, the campaign grounded its aspirational narrative in a specific geography while serving the brand's primary commercial market in the United States. The central creative idea — that anyone can dream a new version of themselves and then build it — mapped directly onto Squarespace's platform proposition: the tools to turn a creative ambition into a functioning online presence. The Clapboard Score for this campaign is 64 out of 100, reflecting strong production craft and cultural resonance alongside questions about long-term brand recall differentiation.
Squarespace positioned this campaign to help people turn creative aspirations into tangible realities, according to squarespace.com. The strategic logic was coherent: in a crowded website-builder market, feature parity among major platforms made emotional differentiation the primary competitive lever available to the brand.
The website-builder market presented a specific competitive challenge for Squarespace in the United States. According to tooltester.com, WordPress held approximately 59.7% of websites using a tracked CMS in 2019, while Squarespace held 2.7% against Wix at 1.8% and Shopify at 2.6%. A separate market-share estimate from sitebuilderreport.com placed Squarespace at 18.92% within the dedicated website-builder platform segment, behind Wix at 31.05% and ahead of Shopify at 13.34%. Against Wix in particular — a direct competitor that had pursued aggressive celebrity and humour-led Super Bowl advertising of its own — Squarespace needed a creative register that felt distinctly cinematic rather than promotional.
According to marketingbrew.com, Squarespace had undergone a five-year creative shift prior to this campaign, moving from straightforward website advertising toward celebrity-led storytelling centred on independent creators and personal ambition. That lineage included the 'Real Talk' Super Bowl 50 campaign featuring Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele, developed with agency Anomaly, which was appointed as Squarespace's lead creative agency in November 2015, according to adweek.com. The 'Dream It' campaign extended that trajectory, using Idris Elba's cultural authority and the directorial credibility of Spike Jonze to elevate the brand beyond a utility into a symbol of possibility in the United States market.
Spike Jonze directed the 'Dream It' film, bringing a background in music video and feature filmmaking to a one-minute commercial format. The film's cinematographer was James Laxton, whose collaboration with Jonze produced imagery that adsoftheworld.com and shots.net both noted for its visual coherence and tonal control across five distinct fantasy sequences.
The structural device of the film places Idris Elba lip-syncing to 'Que Será, Será' — the Doris Day standard carrying its own cultural freight about fate and aspiration — while the visuals cycle through his imagined careers. The song was not performed in its original recording. According to squarespace.com, the version heard in the film was performed live by Karishva Ghai and the Kaos Signing Choir for Deaf & Hearing Children, a creative choice that added both sonic warmth and an inclusive dimension to the campaign's central message about open possibility.
Production took place in East London, according to shots.net, grounding the film's visual identity in the urban environment associated with Elba's biography. This specificity of place gave the abstract concept of dreaming a textural authenticity that pure studio production would have undermined. The companion film 'Make It' adopted a contrasting mockumentary register, with comedian Lolly Adefope joining Elba to navigate the practical steps of building his 2HR SET apparel website, according to squarespace.com. The tonal shift between the two films — one lyrical and cinematic, the other comic and grounded — was itself a demonstration of the platform's range. According to squarespace.com, Idris Elba reflected during the campaign period on his long-term desire to teach and pass on creative knowledge, a sentiment that reinforced the 'Dream It' narrative without requiring the film itself to carry explanatory weight. Jonze subsequently won the 2020 Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Commercials for this work, according to imdb.com.
Spike Jonze won the 2020 Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Commercials for the 'Dream It' film, according to imdb.com. That institutional recognition from within the filmmaking industry represents a verifiable and significant measure of the campaign's craft achievement, distinct from conventional advertising metrics.
No verified third-party performance data covering view counts, brand-lift measurements, or commercial conversion figures for the 'Dream It with Idris Elba' campaign is publicly available. Analysis must therefore rest on structural evidence. The campaign's Super Bowl LIII adjacency in the United States placed it within one of the most competitive and highest-cost advertising environments of 2019, where attention is scarce and brand recall is contested. The decision to release the film on January 30, 2019 — days before the game — rather than exclusively during the broadcast itself, according to squarespace.com, reflects a distribution strategy designed to generate earned media and social sharing ahead of peak viewing.
The two-film structure, pairing a cinematic short with a functional product demonstration in 'Make It', addressed both brand-building and direct conversion objectives within a single campaign architecture. The casting of Idris Elba, whose global profile extends well beyond the United States, and the deployment of Spike Jonze as director, positioned the work as cultural content as much as advertising — a framing that typically extends organic reach and press coverage beyond paid distribution windows. The campaign's Clapboard Score of 64 out of 100 reflects this balance: genuine craft and strategic coherence, tempered by the challenge any platform brand faces in making utility feel emotionally urgent.
'Dream It with Idris Elba' is a 2019 Squarespace campaign directed by Spike Jonze. The one-minute film follows Idris Elba lip-syncing to 'Que Será, Será' while imagining five alternative careers. It launched on January 30, 2019, ahead of Super Bowl LIII in the United States, and was produced in-house by Squarespace.
Spike Jonze directed the 'Dream It' film for Squarespace. Jonze subsequently won the 2020 Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Commercials for this work, according to imdb.com. Cinematographer James Laxton also contributed to the film's visual identity, which was shot in East London.
The Squarespace 'Dream It' commercial uses 'Que Será, Será', the Doris Day standard about fate and aspiration. According to squarespace.com, the version in the film was performed by Karishva Ghai and the Kaos Signing Choir for Deaf and Hearing Children, with Idris Elba lip-syncing throughout the spot.
Squarespace produced the 'Dream It with Idris Elba' campaign in-house rather than through an external advertising agency, according to musebyclios.com. This was a deliberate production choice. Squarespace had previously worked with agency Anomaly, appointed as lead creative agency in November 2015, according to adweek.com, for earlier brand campaigns.
The companion film is titled 'Make It'. According to squarespace.com, it is a mockumentary-style piece in which Idris Elba and comedian Lolly Adefope build a Squarespace website for Elba's real apparel line, 2HR SET. Where 'Dream It' is cinematic and lyrical, 'Make It' adopts a comic, grounded register focused on the platform's practical capabilities.
Squarespace held approximately 2.7% of websites using a tracked CMS in 2019, according to tooltester.com, behind dominant competitor WordPress. In the dedicated website-builder segment, sitebuilderreport.com placed Squarespace at 18.92%, behind Wix. Facing feature-parity competition, Squarespace used cinematic storytelling and Idris Elba's cultural authority to pursue emotional brand differentiation in the United States market.
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