SharkNinja's Holiday Spot Goes 'Entertainment-First' With Brady, Hart and Beckham

SharkNinja released its holiday campaign today, built around Kevin Hart house-sitting for David Beckham and inviting Tom Brady and Aryna Sabalenka over — with each star then posting denial videos after things got broken. The rollout is the appliance maker's most explicit embrace yet of "entertainment-first" advertising, the label that has dominated marketing conversations this year, including several at Digiday.

The mechanics matter for practitioners. Grainy "CCTV" clips of the celebrities started leaking across the stars' and SharkNinja's social accounts at the start of the month, two days before the full spot dropped today. In the ad itself, Sabalenka drinks straight from a Ninja slushie machine's spout, Brady steps on a present while inspecting a skincare face mask, and Hart cracks a picture frame with a Shark vacuum. Beckham watches it all live on his phone from his own security cameras.

What makes it 'entertainment-first'?

Laura Dyer, senior vice president of global brand and partnerships at SharkNinja, defined the test plainly: it comes down to whether people want to share the ad and talk about it. Anything else is "educational." She described the ideal reaction as viewers turning to someone nearby and saying, "this is so funny, you should watch it."

The deliberately short rollout window is strategic. "If you make it too long people lose a little interest," Dyer said. The point is to get people guessing. "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?'" she added.

How does the campaign reach shoppers?

After launch, the spot moves to TV while local brand ambassadors in Italy, France, Germany and other markets run their own versions under the same banner — "there's no home like a SharkNinja home" — with extensions running through the end of the year. Product messaging sits inside the entertainment: Hart vacuums Beckham's house with the machine bent mid-shaft to reach under a table, a SharkNinja party trick. "The product is always the hero," Dyer said. Clicking through lands shoppers on a homepage selling Hart, Beckham and Sabalenka's favorites.

The celebrity-led push is a notable call for a brand held up all year as a creator marketing case study. Dyer framed it as fit, not exclusion: "I wouldn't say it's conscious at the exclusion of content creators." Creators will be seeded with the campaign through the season, and their videos of kitchens packed with SharkNinja kit originally gave the team the idea.

Who made the ad?

SharkNinja produced the spot without an agency. Its in-house team, Creative Studios, wrote and produced it while working directly with each celebrity's team — doing "pretty much all of it by ourselves," Dyer said. 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. Dyer left the door open for agencies on future work, citing the in-house team's talent rather than any structural shift.

The "entertainment-first" framing itself signals where the industry has landed: after years of ads built to satisfy performance dashboards, making something people would choose to watch now requires declaration. Gary Vaynerchuk, CEO and chairman at VaynerX, put the tension sharply 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." SharkNinja's sales results this holiday season will show whether the bet pays off.