SharkNinja Goes Entertainment-First for Holiday Push With Hart, Brady, Sabalenka

SharkNinja's holiday campaign puts Kevin Hart, Tom Brady, Aryna Sabalenka and David Beckham in one spot, produced entirely in-house, under the industry's new banner of "entertainment-first" advertising. Hart house-sits for Beckham, invites Brady and Sabalenka over, and things get broken. Each star then posted a video denying it was them.

The rollout began at the start of the month, two days before the full spot aired today. Grainy "CCTV" clips and denial videos appeared on the celebrities' accounts and SharkNinja's own channels. In the full film, Sabalenka drinks straight from the spout of a Ninja slushie machine. Brady examines one of the company's skincare face masks and steps on a present. Hart cracks a picture frame with a Shark vacuum. Beckham watches everything live from his phone via his security cameras.

What makes an ad 'entertainment-first'?

Laura Dyer, senior vice president of global brand and partnerships at SharkNinja, said the test is simple: whether people want to share the ad and talk about it. Anything else is "educational," she said. The label itself signals where the industry has landed. After years of ads built to satisfy performance dashboards, making something people would choose to watch has become a declared brand position.

SharkNinja has run this play before. When Brady joined last October, a teaser had the internet expecting a second Netflix roast. The reveal: he was roasting a chicken in a Ninja air fryer. The holiday campaign repeats the trick with a bigger cast and a Christmas tree.

Dyer said the short rollout window is deliberate. "If you make it too long people lose a little interest," she said. "We want people to start speculating, asking 'what is this from SharkNinja? Where are they? Why are they denying being in David Beckham's house?'"

How do you sell appliances inside a celebrity caper?

The spot still has to explain what the vacuum does and why it costs what it costs. Holiday shopping is when that matters most for SharkNinja. Dyer's team tucked the answers into the action. Hart vacuums Beckham's house with the machine bent in the middle so it reaches under a table — a SharkNinja party trick.

"The product is always the hero," said Dyer. The campaign will be judged on sales as much as brand equity. Anyone who clicks through lands on a homepage selling Hart, Beckham and Sabalenka's favorites. Once the spot drops, it moves to TV, while local brand ambassadors in Italy, France, Germany and other markets run their own versions under the same "there's no home like a SharkNinja home" banner, with extensions through the end of the year.

Why celebrities instead of creators?

SharkNinja spent the year held up as a creator marketing case study, so leading with celebrities is an unexpected call. Dyer framed it as fit, not exclusion. "I wouldn't say it's conscious at the exclusion of content creators," she said. Creators will be seeded with the campaign through the season. Their videos of kitchens crammed with SharkNinja kit gave the team the idea in the first place.

The in-house team, Creative Studios, wrote and produced the spot and worked directly with each celebrity's team. Last year's neighborhood spot, which had Hart moving in next door to Beckham, was made in close partnership with HartBeat, Hart's production company. This time SharkNinja did "pretty much all of it by ourselves," Dyer said. She left the door open to agencies: if one makes sense, SharkNinja will hire it, because "our team is talented."

What does the 'entertainment-first' label really admit?

Dyer described the ideal reaction as viewers turning to someone and saying, "this is so funny, you should watch it." Nobody branded that strategy when three channels existed and the ad break was the only way back to the programme. Audiences now skip, scroll and pay extra to remove ads, so a brand making watchable content has to say so out loud. Calling it entertainment-first is mostly an admission of how much of the rest people have learned to ignore.

The point echoed at Advertising Week New York last month. "Oftentimes we are incredibly comfortable in our industry to waste quadrillions of dollars on things that fake reports justify, though everyone in this room knows it is garbage," said Gary Vaynerchuk, CEO and chairman at VaynerX. "We are petrified to spend some pennies on something that everyone in this room knows is happening and is real, yet we don't have the corporate reporting internally yet to justify what's actually happening."

For SharkNinja, the gamble now rests on whether speculation, celebrity denials and a bent vacuum convert into holiday sales.