When Billy Met Mayo | Hellmann’s
It’s a Hellmann’s mayonnaise ad
When Meg Ryan posted a photo of her and Billy Crystal, him in his white sweater from When Harry Met Sally, with the caption that “something iconic” was happening, it had all the hallmarks of something that was going to disappoint. It looked a little cheap, and the wording was vague, clearly trying to goad us into thinking great things were on the way. Today, the project was finally revealed. No, it is not a When Harry Met Sally sequel, or a play, or any sort of creative endeavor that would probably also be bad, but would at least leverage the cultural warmth for Nora Ephron’s seminal 1989 romcom for any good. It’s an ad for Hellmann’s mayonnaise. Sydney Sweeney is there too.
Of course it was going to be an ad. Every year around the Super Bowl, brands devise new ways to leverage beloved pop culture moments to shill their products. Dolly Parton rewrote “9 to 5” for Squarespace. Apartments.com made an ad that looked like Arrival. Popcorners equated its product to meth in a Breaking Bad ad. And while it’s maybe nice that Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal reunited for an actual product you can buy in the store instead of, say, a sham AI company or a gambling app, it’s deeply frustrating to see this tactic used yet again.
The ad, created by the ad firm Edelman, is a redux of the famous fake orgasm scene, in which Sally Albright (Meg Ryan) attempts to prove to Harry Burns (Billy Crystal) that women can very convincingly fake orgasms. She lets loose in the middle of Katz’s, moaning and writhing to completion, before smiling and getting back to her sandwich. Afterward, a woman sitting at an adjacent table (played by director Rob Reiner’s mother) delivers the iconic line “I’ll have what she’s having.”
Here, however, the noises of pleasure are produced after Ryan douses her formerly bland turkey sandwich with Hellmann’s mayo, because the mayo is good. And Sweeney chimes in to deliver the iconic line, which now just means that she will also have mayo.
The ad isn’t offensive. Some of my coworkers think it’s cute. And at least they filmed it at Katz’s, which has released a “What She’s Having” sandwich package in conjunction with the ad, complete with a bottle of Hellmann’s. Perhaps I am riled up about other things in the world and channeling all my rage into a mayonnaise ad. But there’s something sinister about the way brands keep finding bigger, flashier ways to repurpose great moments in art to sell products. I guess this is what advertising is and has always been: Don Draper’s carousel asking you to buy back your own nostalgia from Kodak.
But at least the carousel was an original narrative, not a scene from the mind of one of the 20th century’s greatest screenwriters flattened of all tension and charm, made to remind you that an extraordinarily popular condiment exists. When creativity itself is being sold as something AI can just do for you, it’s a bummer to see brands not even bother to try. Anyway, consider yourself reminded about Hellmann’s — which Katz’s has explicitly asked that you not use on pastrami.
