Ben Stiller’s Super Bowl ad features an 80s dance track born in Tuscany

A Super Bowl commercial broadcast on Sunday night in the United States has brought an unexpected Tuscan connection to one of the world’s most watched television events. The ad, produced for Instacart, stars Ben Stiller alongside pop musician Benson Boone, and is built around a reworked version of In America, an electronic dance track released in 1982 by Livorno-based DJ and producer Riccardo Cioni.

The spot aired during Super Bowl LX, played on 8 February 2026 at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California, an event followed by tens of millions of viewers in the United States and abroad.

A comic performance set to an 80s Tuscan dance track

The commercial presents Stiller and Boone as members of a flamboyant, retro-futuristic synth-pop band performing a song titled Bananas, created specifically for Instacart. The setting is a glittering, pixelated computer world, with the performers dressed in shiny Lycra jumpsuits inspired by 1980s aesthetics, alongside dancing fruit and vegetables.

During the performance, Boone executes a backflip on stage. Stiller’s character attempts to outdo him, climbing to a higher point before falling into the stairs and onto the drummer below, causing the show to collapse into chaos. The ad ends with Instacart’s message about letting customers choose their groceries exactly as they want, summed up in the tagline “Bananas Just How You Like”.

Underlying the comic sketch is the distinctive electronic rhythm of In America, a track that marked the peak of Riccardo Cioni’s career and became a staple of Italian dance floors in the early 1980s.

From a bar between Pisa and Livorno to a global TV audience

In America was written and recorded in 1982. The initial idea for the song came to him late at night while returning from a DJ set, when he stopped at a bar along the road between Pisa and Livorno and jotted down the melody. The song later became widely known in Italian and European club scenes, helped by a low-budget but memorable music video featuring red jumpsuits and an improvised setting.

More than four decades later, the track has resurfaced in a major American advertising production. The Instacart spot was directed by Spike Jonze and uses the song’s recognisable synth line to evoke an explicitly 1980s atmosphere, both in sound and visuals.

Riccardo Cioni, who died in 2021 at the age of 66, is widely remembered in Livorno and beyond as a key figure in Italian dance music of that period. In recent years, his work has continued to circulate among DJs, collectors and online audiences, gaining renewed attention.

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