Deliverable 01 — The pitch

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A :30 Super Bowl spot — storyboard

30 seconds · in-gameNarrated by Zendaya (as Rue)Starring Sydney Sweeney & Alexa DemieReverse-montageDark-comic

00:00Cold open

Wide00:00

Push in00:02

Dead of night. The dark is almost total. We see a coffin breaking the surface and blowing soil and dust as it opens. At the rim, Cassie (Sydney Sweeney) and Maddy (Alexa Demie) are the only things the light finds. They scream and cling to each other as they process what they are seeing. The camera holds a beat too long, enough to be uncomfortable.

Rue — V.O. (Zendaya)

“This was Nate Jacobs. …Yeah. We’ll get back to that.”

00:04 – 00:11Rewind

⏮ Reverse00:04 — 00:11

The image rips backward. Sound sucks into reverse. His whole collapse runs in fast-forward-reverse: a snake retreating up an air pipe, fists un-swinging, a wedding un-crashing. Fragmented, kinetic, never lingering on any one horror.

Rue — V.O. (Zendaya)

“Nate had everything. His dad’s company. The big house. The girl.”

00:12The turn

Close on flower00:12

The rewind decelerates. We pull off Nate, off the chaos, down to a patch of untouched dirt. And one small white flower.

Rue — V.O. (Zendaya)

“And then somebody found a flower. A rare one. The kind you’re not allowed to build on.”

The one thing I want the audience to walk away with

This 30-second Super Bowl ad is intentional about not explaining who Pulley is or what it does. It has one objective: to make people feel the problem through a pop-culture reference that's cinematic, carries recognizable talent, and is built to travel and earn media.

The viewer should be left with a question - "What the hell is Pulley?" - and then an inference: "they make things happen when they should (and if they should)."

The spot earns the search while the site does the explaining. Pulley is a Series A company nobody at the party has likely heard of, and that's exactly why this works: an unknown brand either wins the next morning's conversation or wastes the buy.

Why this creative direction

Brands already established in the zeitgeist can afford safe bets. Pulley sells to chains, developers, and data-center builders, an audience not exactly glamorous. So I went the bold path, and discarded every version of the copy and treatment that softened it.

Euphoria's last season shows the demise of Nate Jacobs (Jacob Elordi) over a stalled construction project, where a permit fight over a protected flower becomes the one thing his menace couldn't move.

The delay buries him in debt, then in the ground, feet from those flowers. No writers' room could hand a permitting company a better gift.

We show his collapse in reverse, Rue (Zendaya) narrating, and the camera resting on the thing that outlived him.

The spot doesn't avert his death, nor does it play with an alternate ending. There is never a definition of permitting; it's present the entire time, even though it's never named. The paperwork is the punchline.

What I had to believe about Pulley and the audience

The audience doesn't need to be taught. Instead, it needs to be intrigued, and it rewards recognition and wit over instruction. I had to believe the entire category is interesting enough to carry Zendaya and prestige-TV craft, and to show that paperwork can be a more ruthless villain than Nate, who held the title before. The permit fight lies at the root of a death that the entire country watched unfold.

Casting Zendaya as Rue preserves the show's voice instead of replacing it with a narrator selling software. "Some things were never meant to get built" is a position, and the follow-through - "Yours?" - is a question, not a pitch, because trusting the audience to answer it is one of the most confident things an unknown brand can do.

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The Brief

The one thing I want the audience to walk away with

Why this creative direction

What I had to believe about Pulley and the audience

Some things were never meant to get built.

The Loom