Dunkin’ and Ben Affleck have spent the past few Super Bowls building out a weirdly committed little pop-culture side quest, and this year the brand leans all the way into the bit: “Good Will Dunkin,” a faux never-aired sitcom pilot “set” in nineteen ninety-five, presented as the coffee chain’s iced-coffee origin story.
The premise is simple and deliberately nostalgic: Cambridge, Massachusetts; a Dunkin’ shop; a South Boston kid named “Will” (Affleck) who turns out to be a math savant between orders—scribbling equations on the store window and even arranging Munckins into the Fibonacci sequence, which convinces a baffled manager (played by Jason Alexander) that he’s stumbled onto a once-in-a-generation mind.
From there, the ad plays like a multi-cam ensemble comedy that somehow “got lost” behind the couch cushions of pop culture history: Jennifer Aniston, Matt LeBlanc, Alfonso Ribeiro, Jaleel White, Jasmine Guy, and Ted Danson rotate through the gag machine, all dropping familiar sitcommy energy into a story that’s basically “Good Will Hunting” filtered through laugh tracks and Dunkin’ branding.
The cast appears younger because the performers were digitally de-aged for the spot, which only deepens the “found VHS” conceit. And if the whole thing feels like a deliberate time warp, that’s by design: Dunkin’ frames “Good Will Dunkin’” as a “long-buried” piece of television that resurfaced in time for the big game—part of an ongoing collaboration with Artists Equity (Affleck’s company), with the brand also saying this marks his fourth Dunkin’ ad to air during the Super Bowl broadcast.
The joke isn’t just the casting stunt, either—it’s the way the commercial treats iced coffee like the kind of cultural “invention” that could be discovered in the wild, the same way “Good Will Hunting” turns genius into a surprise you stumble across on a campus floor. Dunkin’ explicitly positions the spot as a mash-up of two ’90s comforts: the sitcoms people keep rewatching and the coffee run they keep repeating.
Dunkin’ chief marketing officer Jill Nelson described the campaign as a time-machine collision of those touchstones: “The ’90s gave us iconic sitcoms, and Dunkin’ gave the world iced coffee,” she said in a statement, adding, “Good Will Dunkin’ brings us back in time to imagine the moment those worlds collided. It’s a reminder that Dunkin’ has always been part of everyday culture, and proof that it always will be.”
And because Dunkin’ can’t do a Super Bowl swing without turning it into a full-on activation, the brand also announced a next-day giveaway tied to the spot’s “1995 breakthrough” framing: one point nine nine five million free iced coffees (any size) in the Dunkin’ app on Monday, February 9, with redemption via an offer code. There’s also a limited ‘90s-themed merch drop (including a “visor-with-hair” riff) available via the brand’s merch site.
Finally, Dunkin’ is extending the math gag into the real world: the company says it teamed with John Urschel—an MIT professor and former NFL player—on a whiteboard problem “inspired by the spot,” with one solver set to win free Dunkin’ coffee for a year plus signed merch.
