 We did not have people in the head with real lemons. I just want to make that clear. My name is Jessica Griffith and I'm an executive producer at Widen. My name is Connor Mason. They're currently the senior director of Bud Light Seltzer. I'm Gerard Caputo and I am group creative director at Widen in Kennedy, New York. What was the conversation around that like first idea? They called us and they said, we're gonna, we're launching Bud Light Seltzer, lemonade and we're gonna do it on the Super Bowl. We pretty quickly came up with the idea of lemons because of that saying when life gives you lemons, make lemonade. I don't think there was a year that gave us more lemons than 2020. The lemons thing was a very, it was quick to get to and what took more time was how we're gonna do it. You know, we were dreaming up the concept back in late September and then into October and really felt that by kind of like November timeframe, we were very clear on the vision and that's when we started talking to different directors. And it's kind of like a kaleidoscope at the end. Like you have, you know, all of these pieces that feel very frantic. All of a sudden they clicked together at the pre-pro meeting. We had a great pre-pro meeting and we were ready to go. When did Bud Light Seltzer start making lemonade? Probably when 2020 handed us all those lemons. 2020 was a lemon of a year. The experience of 2020 and living through the pandemic was so central to this idea of the spot. How did it kind of shape the creative decisions that you had to make for this shoot? You know, I think what we've really tried to do all year is convey our understanding of what everyone is going through. I think where we spent a lot of the time is making sure the scenes really felt relatable to people. And so that's why we had some of the, you know, the haircuts or the missed weddings or some of those scenes. There's a lot of things around 2020 that people really remember as those relatable situations. We also cast real couples in the happy New Year scene. A lot of our extras have been roommates. So I think that with creative thinking, we could bring this vision to life. We want to do something that's spoke to them and not me of the year, which I thought helped, once again, tell that universal story that we've all been through. From the song choice, the song surprisingly is called Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. We had 4,000 real lemons. We had about 1,400 plastic lemons. We had some foam lemons that were actually hitting the people in the windshield of the bus scene. The lemons that are exploding, those are being thrown by art production. So when you see lemons exploding in certain places, those are actually practical. For the airport scene, which we actually filmed at the LA Convention Center, the inspiration for that scene was actually Home Alone. That scene where the family is running through the airport, if you notice, the camera is actually positioned a little lower. And that is something, when you look at our spot, we actually took direct inspiration from that, which I think is a little fun. For the haircut scene, normally when you do a scene like that, you only have one to two takes at it because you're cutting real hair. So once the hair is cut, it's not growing back anytime soon. The guy's hair, actually, he had so much of it that we actually did 10 to 15 takes of that shot because his hair in the back, we could flatten to the front, and then he could do it over and over again, and you couldn't really tell. One of my favorites was the cardboard cutouts that actually got pelted with lemons. I was like, oh, how are we gonna kind of destroy these cardboard for fans of lemons? And there was literally people there just winging them. I think there's something satisfying, too, about seeing them get kind of smashed because it's annoying that the cardboard fans get to go to all the games and everyone else has to stay home. I think if I didn't have my job, my, the job I would want would be the guy throwing the lemons at the cardboard fans for sure. There's a lot of lemons. Well, you know what they say when life gives you lemons. We know the saying, Mark. You know, having this guy come in and say the same thing, they cut them off because it's like they're speaking for the audience. Like, we know the saying, like you don't have to tell us the saying. And I think for me that saved it. I didn't really want to say the saying. How have fans responded to the ad? By our metrics, we were accounting for over 300,000 conversations that happened about our Super Bowl spot from January 28th up until the Super Bowl and then through that entire day. Is there anything that you're taking from this experience of making a Super Bowl ad during a pandemic year that you think you'll continue to apply to your work when things go back to some kind of relative normal? It just pours you to focus on the things that you can actually control. It taught us how to be more connected as a team and communicate better as a team because we don't all get to be on set. In fact, no one from the brand or agency team was on set. The bonus is, you know, I've been able to have other people observe the shoot. We have an intern watch shoots. We have project managers. Like, everyone can kind of dip in and check out, hey, what's going on on a shoot? You know, it was really a learning experience for me of what can be done when you get some amazingly creative people together. So I would say that's kind of my takeaway from this whole experience.