Squarespace 'Unavailable': Yorgos Lanthimos and the Domain Crisis
Squarespace has made a habit of its Super Bowl spots by pairing the brand’s product — website creation — with a director who has no business being in an ad for website creation. The results have been consistently better than they have any right to be. “Unavailable,” directed by Yorgos Lanthimos and starring Emma Stone, is the latest entry in this tradition and possibly the most formally committed.
The Concept
Emma Stone tries to register emmastone.com. It’s taken. She tries variations — each one more desperate, more surreal, more detached from her actual identity as the name slips further away. Shot on black-and-white analogue film, the spot follows Stone’s gradual dissociation from her own name as the domain system’s neutral rejections (“Unavailable”) pile up into something that looks very much like an existential crisis.
The product demonstration — what Squarespace is for, why you should register your domain — is embedded in a character study about digital identity. That is not how most SaaS brands think about their advertising. It is how Yorgos Lanthimos thinks about everything.
Lanthimos and Stone
This is not the first collaboration between the Greek director and the actress. “Poor Things” (2023) and “Bugonia” most recently cemented a working relationship built on Stone’s willingness to commit to whatever the material requires and Lanthimos’s interest in finding the horror in ordinary human mechanisms.
For “Unavailable,” the ordinary mechanism is the domain registration form. The horror — and it is played as a specific kind of absurdist horror — is the discovery that your name is unavailable. That someone else’s claim on a string of characters could produce a crack in your sense of self is, when you think about it, genuinely strange. Lanthimos makes you think about it.
The Black-and-White Choice
Shooting on analogue black-and-white film for a Super Bowl spot is a declaration. It says: we are not competing with the other commercials on their terms. The production aesthetic separates “Unavailable” from every other ad in the break at a perceptual level before a single word of dialogue is spoken.
The choice also suits the tone. Black-and-white analogue registers as “serious” in ways that colour digital doesn’t — it imports connotations of film history, of art cinema, of work made with conviction rather than committee. Against the candy-coloured CGI spectacle of most Super Bowl advertising, “Unavailable” reads as a foreign language film playing in a multiplex. The contrast is the point.
The Extended Universe
“Unavailable” was accompanied by two additional films: “The Negotiation,” a fictionalized behind-the-scenes piece depicting Stone trying to reclaim her domain, and “A Message From Emma Stone,” a PSA-style film living at emmastone.com itself — a warning to anyone who hasn’t yet claimed their name online.
This campaign architecture — where the Super Bowl spot is the hook and the extended content does the work of explaining the product — is increasingly common, but Squarespace executes it with unusual formal commitment. The films actually reward watching rather than functioning purely as distribution vehicles.
What Squarespace Does Right
Squarespace’s Super Bowl advertising consistently demonstrates something that most technology brands fail to achieve: it makes a technical product feel human. Domain registration is not inherently emotional. The process of getting a website online is not inherently dramatic. By finding directors who treat these acts as worthy of serious creative attention, Squarespace converts the utilitarian into the meaningful.
The underlying product truth — that your online identity matters, that claiming your name online is a genuine act of self-definition — is what gives “Unavailable” its engine. Lanthimos and Stone simply follow that truth where it leads.
Client: Squarespace Director: Yorgos Lanthimos Star: Emma Stone Year: 2026
