Kevin Hart is house-sitting for David Beckham. Tom Brady and Aryna Sabalenka come over. Things get broken. Then each of them posts a video swearing they were never there, while grainy security-camera clips leak across social a couple of days before the full spot drops.
That’s SharkNinja’s holiday campaign, which launched November 4 and will run across social and TV. It follows last year’s spot, in which Hart moved in next door to Beckham. And according to Digiday, SharkNinja made the whole thing without an agency. Its in-house team, Creative Studios, wrote and produced it and worked directly with each celebrity’s people.
Laura Dyer, SharkNinja’s senior VP of global brand and partnerships, gave Digiday the cleanest definition of entertainment-first we’ve heard: it comes down to whether people want to share the ad and talk about it. Everything else, in her framing, is educational.
She’s right. And that is exactly the problem with the phrase.
Because what Dyer described isn’t a new strategy. It’s the job. It has always been the job. Shareability is not a format you bolt onto a media plan like a 15-second cutdown. It’s the minimum bar for asking a stranger to hand you their attention. Rebranding it as entertainment-first is a quiet confession that for years the industry shipped ads that were something-else-first, and audiences responded the only rational way: by leaving the room.
The data on that exodus is brutal. Kantar found that 86% of TV and video viewers take action to avoid ads, with repetition and over-saturation leading the list of irritants, according to MediaPost’s coverage. System1’s Cost of Dull research, covered by B&T in April, estimates that dull creative forces brands to spend an extra $189 billion in media just to match the impact of emotionally engaging work. Its conclusion: “Humour is the most consistent antidote to dull.”
That’s the bill for boring. And somebody sold every single one of those boring ads to somebody.
Now look at the other half of the SharkNinja story, the half agencies would rather not dwell on. A brand with global reach, A-list talent under contract and a sharp creative idea decided it didn’t need outside help. Not for the concept, not for the scripts, not for the shoot. Dyer told Digiday, more or less, that her team is talented and did nearly all of it themselves.
This isn’t a one-brand mood. The ANA’s most recent in-house agency study, from 2023, found that 82% of its members had an in-house agency, up from 42% in 2008. MediaPost’s coverage of that report added that 65% had moved some established work in-house over the previous three years, and that digital creative, the social and search and email grind, was the category moving fastest.
Read those numbers and the uncomfortable math writes itself. If what an agency sells is production, the ability to turn a deck into deliverables, then that agency is competing against a salaried team down the hall that already knows the product, already sits in the meetings and never sends an invoice. That’s not a fair fight. It’s barely a fight. And the in-house team gets faster every year, because every campaign it ships teaches it something an outside vendor billing by the deliverable never gets to keep.
Here’s where we’d normally declare the agency dead, collect our LinkedIn applause and log off. That’s not what the evidence says, and it’s not what SharkNinja said either.
The same Digiday piece notes that this isn’t necessarily a sign of things to come, and that SharkNinja will bring in an agency when one makes sense. The ANA coverage says 92% of members still use outside agencies. In-house didn’t kill the agency. It killed the agency that only executes.
What survived, and what clients still go outside for, is the stuff that’s hard to grow inside a building full of people who love the product: taste, outside perspective, and the sense of timing that tells you which joke the culture is ready for this week and which one curdled last Tuesday.
Look closely at what SharkNinja actually did and you’ll find those qualities, not production values, carrying the work. The idea is a sitcom premise that lives natively on social; celebrities posting denial videos is a format people already understand from their own feeds. The rollout is short on purpose, because Dyer’s view is that people lose interest when you drag it out. And the comedy comes with its own infrastructure. Last year’s spot was made in close partnership with Hart’s company, HartBeat, whose stated aim in the 2025 announcement was to make brands “part of the laugh, not just part of the backdrop.”
That’s taste. That’s cultural timing. That’s knowing a fake security-camera leak on a Tuesday afternoon will travel further than a polished sixty-second hero film on a Sunday night. A brand can absolutely build that muscle in-house, and some clearly have. But that sensibility usually comes from living in culture across dozens of categories and audiences, not from spending years inside one.
There’s also a tell in how the work is built. Dyer was clear that the product is still the hero, and that local ambassadors in Italy, France and Germany will make their own versions under the same banner. In other words, the entertainment isn’t decoration around the air fryer. It’s the delivery system for it, adapted market by market by people who know what’s funny there. That is a cultural operation, not a production one.
And it isn’t one spot. Over the past year SharkNinja has assembled something closer to a recurring cast than a media buy: Hart signed on as an ambassador in October 2025, Brady joined as a multi-year global ambassador weeks later, and Heidi Klum came aboard in December to carry the Neighbors series into Germany and the rest of EMEA. By April, Brady was surprising Boston-area families with backyard makeovers under the Tom Upgrady banner. That’s a writers’ room logic applied to appliances: build characters people want to check in on, then keep giving them something to do. The ads are episodes. The brand is the show.
That’s the line we draw in our own work. We don’t pitch ourselves as a production line with a logo on it. Production is table stakes; a phone and a ring light can make a decent asset now. What clients actually get from us is the call on what’s worth making at all, built from living in the feeds and the neighborhoods and the group chats where culture actually happens, from a Saturday line outside a Fairfax drop to whatever sound is taking over Reels by Thursday. Production follows taste. Never the other way around.
So, to every agency nervously reading the SharkNinja coverage: the brand didn’t prove you’re unnecessary. It proved that the thing you used to charge for is now a commodity, and that the thing you were supposed to be bringing all along is the only part with a price left on it.
And to every brand about to call its next campaign entertainment-first: congratulations on discovering the assignment. Now go make something a person would actually send to a friend.
If nobody shares it, it was never entertainment. It was a brochure with a celebrity in it, and nobody gives a damn about brochures.
