Reese's Super Bowl LVIII
For Super Bowl LVIII, Reese’s introduced the Caramel Big Cup, and the hardest part wasn’t the ad, it was the cup. Practical caramel does what it wants. It had to do what the pack art already showed. Reese’s brought Rocket Lab in to build the product in CG, because a simulation can be sculpted and a real drizzle can’t.
The Problem with Real Caramel
Food this iconic comes with locked references, the drizzle, the proportions, the exact look already printed on the package and running across the rest of the campaign. You cannot direct a practical pour to match a printed asset, take after take, on a Super Bowl deadline. So we built a caramel simulation that was sculptable and controllable, shaped frame by frame to match the existing photography exactly. The pour hits its mark every time because we put it there.
Making It Delicious
The whole job of food work, photographic or CG, is one thing: make it look delicious. That’s hard with chocolate, caramel, and peanut butter, the textures that read as appetizing are subtle and easy to lose. We built the cup from the ground up, the chocolate shell, the interior filling, the caramel, and tuned every surface until it triggered the right reaction. The product is the star of that spot, so it had to be perfect.
Still Running
The end tag we built is still on air. Reese’s has carried it across commercials long after the Super Bowl spot ran, and the work landed on multiple best-of-the-Big-Game lists when it aired. Built on a roughly one-month timeline, and still working years later.
