Watch this brilliant Super Bowl ad from Rocket (who evidently rebranded themselves from Rocket Mortgage at some point?). It's only a minute long. I'll wait.

You said it, closed captions

Ok, you're back?

I think its one of the best I've ever seen.

There's always a lot of great (and not so great) ads during the Super Bowl, but this one is S-tier.

The editing is wonderful and it's very affecting, but what I love most about it is that it exemplifies a very hard to grasp, but powerful concept: Demand side thinking vs. supply side thinking.

I was first introduced to this concept through the writing of Bob Moesta, who has popularized the "Jobs to be Done" framework. I understand this concept through the lens of building products, but I think it's broadly applicable.

The idea is a simple one. In economics you have the "laws" of supply and demand.

Demand = What people want
Supply = What people can buy

Prices, scarcity, innovation - everything in an economy is downstream from how those two forces interact.

Now, when you're building products, it's very natural to think about what the product needs to do. What the user interface should look like, how fast is it, how heavy is it, what color is it, should it have a button here or a toggle there, etc.

These are all supply-side thinking. It's what the product does. "Feeds and speeds."

Demand-side thinking on the other hand is all about what the customer wants. Deep down, what do they need? What are they struggling with? What do they fear losing? What do they hope to gain?

Notice how many emotional words are involved in the demand side. Need, struggle, fear, hope. These are very big, very primal feelings.

My hunch is this is one of the reasons people default to supply side thinking. Exploring big emotions is difficult. It's much easier to resort to tangible things like buttons and settings and materials. Feeds and speeds.

If you go deep down the supply-side/demand-side rabbit hole, you can wind up with a confusing framework full for words and arrows pointing every which way.

Bob got a little carried away with this one.

But I don't think you necessarily need all that to understand the demand side. Because the demand side is all about emotion. So it helps to lean into the emotion.

Back to the Super Bowl ad. What makes it so brilliant is they understand that as much as everyone loves Super Bowl ads, everyone also knows they are being sold something. 

This ad undercuts that.

Most ads focus on the supply side, telling you how crunchy the chip is or how great the detergent smells. They include beautiful or famous actors to evoke some emotions in the viewer, but they're mostly about the qualities of the product that they think their customers want.

Watching the Super Bowl, the viewer's guard is up at the beginning of every ad: "let me see if i can figure out what you're selling me." They're like a safety waiting for the quarterback to throw some supply side marketing at them (note: I had to Google that this is what a safety does in football, hopefully it's true).

What it feels like watching Super Bowl ads

But this ad does it differently. They focus entirely on the demand side. What does the viewer want? What do they need? What do they struggle with?

For this ad, the answer is "home."

But notice they barely ever mention the word "home" in the ad. Remember, the supply side is all about emotion. They want you to feel "home."

The ad opens with a pregnant woman holding her belly. She says "Let's get you home." But aside from that moment and the song lyrics, that word isn't mentioned or written anywhere else. It's not even in the title, even though it's what the whole ad is about.

She's framed off-center (making us feel uneasy) and the colors are cold blue and grey. Remember that, it'll be important later.

Instead, they enlist the viewer in coming up with the word on their own. They basically incept the word into the viewer's mind.

The ad is pure emotion: a nice cover of one of the greatest nostalgia country songs of all time (country being the apex predator of nostalgia music genres) playing over moments related to someone going to a home, leaving a home, in a home.

No shots of a product. Just people experiencing things. Some are positive, some are negative, but the most important thing is they are all highly emotionally resonant. Big feelings.

Then around the 40 second mark, the song begins to build with the phrase "I belong." that line sums up what home means. Belonging.

There's even a nice cut to a stadium of football fans singing it, because everyone watching the Super Bowl is football fan at that moment. It's easy for the viewer to see themselves in the ad even if they've never had any of those other life experiences.

So by the end, the viewer is thinking about home, longing for it. The problem is salient. That's what I want. That's what everyone wants.

That's the demand side. They've made it crystal clear.

Then they just have to nudge a little to get the viewer to come up with the supply side on their own.

They cut the music to get the viewer's attention and flash the word "Own" on the screen over the image of a crying man.

Why is he crying? Did he just buy his first home? Lose his home? Coming home from war and seeing his home again? (He's actually depicted earlier, moving in, but it doesn't really matter - high emotion).

The viewers is feeling strongly about home and sees the word "home." It's like the perfect chemical combination to make someone think of the phrase "own a home."

The demand is now to "own a home." What's the biggest thing in the way? Having the money.

The demand is now to "get money to own a home." How do you do that? A mortgage.

They don't need to say the words "home" or "money" or "mortgage" because the viewer is already thinking them.

They just display "Rocket" on the screen overlaid over the woman from the beginning, centered in the frame, holding her (now born) baby, in a house filled with warm light.

Hello again.

Is a rocket mortgage the fastest? Is it the cheapest? Are the default rates better? More options? I don't know and it doesn't matter.

The ad is entirely demand side. Brilliant.

It reminds me of one of the all-time S-Tier ads: Apple's Misunderstood from 2013 (I'm not crying, you're crying). This one manages an even harder task of interweaving multiple demands into one (a parent's desire for their phone addicted kid to connect with family and an introverts desire to express how they feel).