Barry Keoghan Stars in Squarespace Cinematic Fairy Tale Brand Film for Super Bowl 2025
Last updated on April 29, 2026
Barry Keoghan turns website building into a fairy tale. This is what a cinematic live action brand film looks like at Super Bowl scale.
I Want This for My Brand →| Category | Details |
| Featured Brand | Squarespace |
| Target Audience | Small business owners, entrepreneurs, creative professionals, side hustlers building an online presence |
| Video Style | Live Action |
| Video Type | Brand Film |
| Video Length | 37 seconds |
| Editing Technique | Cinematic cuts, theatrical set design, rich colour grading, controlled pacing for narrative arc within tight runtime |
| Sound Design | Orchestral score with fairy tale motifs, clean dialogue, sweeping audio transitions synced to visual reveals |
Squarespace's Super Bowl 2025 commercial casts Barry Keoghan as the central figure in a fairy tale that reimagines website building as a timeless, heroic act. Aimed at anyone with a creative vision and an idea worth sharing, the film delivers its brand promise in under 40 seconds by leading with story and letting the product speak through context rather than feature listing.
Video Overview
This live action brand film from Squarespace aired during the 2025 Super Bowl and became one of the most discussed commercials of the event. Starring Barry Keoghan in a cinematic fairy tale setting, the spot uses theatrical live action production to reframe a SaaS product, a website builder, as something timeless and aspirational. Rather than showing templates or pricing, Squarespace chose to tell a story, positioning the brand as the force that makes every creative ambition possible. The film is a masterclass in brand-first thinking, where the product is implied rather than demonstrated, and emotional resonance does the persuasive heavy lifting. If your brand serves creators, entrepreneurs, or business owners with a vision, this approach shows how live action brand films can elevate a product into something people genuinely feel.
The production choices behind this commercial are deliberate at every level. The casting of Barry Keoghan, known for complex, emotionally layered performances, gives the spot an air of credibility and cultural currency. The fairy tale narrative structure, complete with set design that evokes storybook worlds, creates visual contrast with the digital product it promotes. MyPromoVideos works with SaaS and B2B brands to craft this kind of script-first live action storytelling, where the creative concept carries the brand message without relying on feature callouts. The result, for Squarespace at least, is a 37-second film that people searched for after the game was over.
What Makes This Video Stand Out?
- Celebrity Anchoring with Purpose: Barry Keoghan is not used as decoration. His presence signals cultural relevance and gives the fairy tale narrative a grounded, human centre. For a brand selling a digital product, attaching the message to a recognisable face transforms abstract aspiration into something audiences can emotionally locate and remember.
- Story Before Product: Squarespace does not open with its interface, pricing, or features. It opens with a story. This structure, lead with narrative, land the brand at the payoff, is one of the most effective frameworks for top-of-funnel brand films, because it earns attention before asking for recognition.
- Fairy Tale Contrast: Setting a commercial for a website builder inside a fairy tale world creates productive cognitive dissonance. The unexpected juxtaposition makes viewers lean in, and the resolution, that Squarespace is where every tale begins, lands with satisfying clarity because the contrast has done the emotional priming.
- Cinematic Production at Scale: The colour grading, set design, costume, and camera work all mirror feature film aesthetics rather than commercial conventions. This communicates brand premium without stating it directly. Viewers absorb the production quality as a signal about Squarespace's own standards and identity.
- Tight Narrative Arc in 37 Seconds: A complete story with a beginning, a middle, and a brand reveal, delivered inside half a minute. The editorial pacing is precise, ensuring no frame is wasted. This compression of storytelling is a technical achievement as much as a creative one, and it is what makes the spot work at Super Bowl speed.
Planning a live action brand film? MPV produces script-first live action videos for SaaS and B2B brands. Four to six week delivery.
Get a Free Estimate →What This Video Does Across Sound, Motion, and Story
Every production element in this Squarespace Super Bowl spot is coordinated to serve the fairy tale narrative, from the orchestral score to the editorial rhythm. Here is how each component contributes.
Theatrical Set Construction
The physical environments are built to evoke storybook worlds rather than real-world settings. This practical set design, rather than digital backgrounds, gives the film a tactile, premium quality that audiences register as cinematic. It signals brand investment and creative seriousness from the first frame.
Colour Grading for Fairy Tale Mood
The grade leans into warm, saturated tones that evoke illustrated storybooks rather than corporate realism. This chromatic choice reinforces the narrative framing and differentiates the spot visually from every other ad in the Super Bowl break, making it easier to recall and share afterwards.
Orchestral Score Architecture
The music builds like a film score, not a jingle. It uses swell and release to guide emotional pacing, signalling to the viewer when to feel wonder and when to expect resolution. This compositional approach is borrowed from feature film tradition and applied here to compress an emotional journey into 37 seconds.
Performance-Led Narrative
Barry Keoghan's physical performance carries the story between dialogue lines. Micro-expressions, posture, and eye movement communicate character intention without exposition. This performance-led approach trusts the audience to read the story through the actor rather than through on-screen text or voiceover explanation.
Controlled Editorial Rhythm
Cuts are timed to the music's beat structure, creating a subconscious sense of momentum. The editor holds key frames long enough for the visual information to register, then releases to the next beat. This rhythm prevents the spot from feeling rushed despite its short runtime, maintaining cinematic weight throughout.
Brand Reveal as Story Resolution
Squarespace is not introduced until the narrative requires resolution. The brand name and tagline arrive as the answer to the story's question, which means the audience receives the brand message as a satisfying conclusion rather than a sales interruption. This placement maximises both recall and positive sentiment simultaneously.
Why This Video Stays With You After One Watch
Squarespace's Super Bowl ad is memorable because it respects the audience's intelligence. It does not explain the product; it makes you feel what the product enables. By casting Barry Keoghan and building a fairy tale world around a website platform, the brand claims cultural territory that no competitor had occupied. That unexpected creative leap, SaaS meets storybook, is precisely what makes it sticky long after the game ends.
When to Use Live Action for Your Business Video
Live action is the format of choice when emotional authenticity and brand credibility matter most. Browse more examples in the live action video gallery to see how different brands use real-world production to build trust.
Top-of-Funnel Brand Awareness
When your goal is brand recognition rather than feature education, live action storytelling creates the emotional resonance needed to make an impression at scale. It is the format that turns viewers into brand-aware prospects before they ever visit your site.
High-Visibility Campaigns
Super Bowls, product launches, rebrands, and major campaign moments all benefit from live action's cinematic credibility. The format signals investment and intentionality, which primes audiences to take the brand seriously in competitive ad environments.
Aspirational Brand Positioning
If your brand story is about what customers can become, not just what your product does, live action lets you show that transformation with human presence and emotional texture. Aspiration lands harder when real people embody it on screen.
Complex Technical Explanations
Live action is less effective when the primary job is showing how a software interface works. For detailed product walkthroughs or multi-step technical explanations, screencast or animated explainers communicate the process more clearly and efficiently.
Production Duration
A script-first live action brand film at MPV typically delivers within four to six weeks. This covers scripting, casting, shoot logistics, editing, colour grading, and final delivery. Complex productions with multiple locations or talent requirements may extend the timeline slightly.
Rapid Iteration or A/B Testing
Live action shoots require fixed locations, cast availability, and on-set logistics, making quick creative pivots expensive. If your campaign requires frequent creative variants or rapid testing of different messages, animated or motion graphics formats offer more flexibility at lower cost per variation.
Why Live Action Works for B2B Marketing
Live action brand films create the kind of emotional imprint that purely digital or animated content struggles to match, because human presence on screen activates empathy and trust responses that accelerate buying consideration. For B2B brands whose products solve real human problems at work, showing real people in real situations builds the credibility that drives pipeline. See how MPV applies this approach across industries in MPV's B2B video case studies.
Production Insight
The Squarespace Super Bowl spot succeeds because every production decision, from the fairy tale set design to Keoghan's casting, is in service of one emotional idea: your story deserves a stage. When the script establishes that singular emotional north star before production begins, every other creative choice becomes easier to make and more coherent in the final cut.
MPV Production Team: 2,000+ B2B Videos ProducedIs Live Action Right for Your Project?
Live action brand films are the right choice when your brand story needs human presence to land its full emotional weight, and when you have a clear creative concept that does not rely on software UI or abstract data visualisation. If you are weighing live action against animation or mixed formats, it helps to understand the decision criteria before committing to a production approach, which is covered in detail in this guide on how to choose the right explainer video company.
Related Search Terms
This Live Action video example is relevant to the following B2B video searches:
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