The Million-Dollar Puzzle: How Slackbot and MrBeast are Rewriting the Super Bowl Playbook 

Typically, brands can spend months or a year creating a 30-second Super Bowl spot. This year, MrBeast and Salesforce made one in just 27 days. 

The resulting campaign is part high-octane TV commercial, part digital treasure hunt, part real-world product demonstration.

At the center sits Slackbot, Salesforce’s personal agent for work — and gateway to a $1 million prize for the eventual winner. Contestants use Slackbot to help them decipher clues embedded in the commercial and behind-the-scenes films. The first person to solve it wins the cash. 

The treasure hunt, now in its 12th day, has hundreds of thousands of investigators trying to crack the case.

The Salesforce Newsroom sat down with John Zissimos, Chief Brand and Creative Officer, to discuss how his team handled the “creative chaos” of working with Beast Industries, how Slack powers a global production of over 500 crew members, and why the future of marketing is influencers.

Salesforce Newsroom: What’s the connection between MrBeast and Slack?

John Zissimos: MrBeast is known for running incredibly fast-paced, high-stakes operations. They put out an incredible, unbelievable show every two weeks. And the way that they work is that Jimmy could have an idea at any moment from anywhere in the world, and he just pops it into Slack. That team just takes off. They use it like crazy. It’s like their oxygen.

To make this particular ad and to create the behind-the-scenes films, we worked together with them in a Slack channel 24/7. Everything that we did, everything that we had to approve, everything we saw, the entire working order between the MrBeast team and our team all happened in Slack. 

Salesforce Newsroom: Tell me more about this contest. 

John Zissimos: It’s what MrBeast does best. He’s got a million dollars in a vault, and to win it, you have to solve a puzzle. And the clues to the puzzle happened as he walked through the ad. There was a QR code and now people are using Slackbot to decipher the clues, which are everywhere. Some of them are in the Super Bowl commercial, some of them in the behind-the-scenes film, some of them are in social posts. You have to follow and solve the clues to unlock the final answer, and the first person that solves it will get a module to send a direct Slack post to MrBeast himself. And that person is going to win a million dollars.

Salesforce Newsroom: So Slackbot is like a personal assistant to help solve the puzzle?

John Zissimos: It’s not going to give you the answers to the clues directly, but it’s going to help you organize your thoughts and point you in the right direction of where to look.

This puzzle is super hard. There’s only five people on the planet that know what the clues are. Who knows how long it’s going to take to solve the puzzle? But Slackbot will move the game along by guiding the players.

We also have a “mission control center” where we can monitor how many people are in the contest, where they are getting stuck, and how the AI is performing. If a clue is too hard, we can adjust the prompt to feed in extra help in real time.

Salesforce Newsroom: There’s always that fear with AI — how do you make sure Slackbot doesn’t accidentally leak the answer?

John Zissimos: It’s highly constrained and programmed to be a guide, not a cheat sheet. It won’t solve the puzzle for you.

The contest could go on for weeks — maybe even months — we don’t know. 

Salesforce Newsroom: This campaign feels like a shift in how Salesforce approaches marketing. Why take this “big swing”?

John Zissimos: Traditional media is not what it used to be. The future is really about working with influencers, enabling them to get a hold of your message, trusting them, giving them the creative ability to think with you and take your work to a place where you might not have full control, but they’re gonna introduce it to an audience and with a megaphone that you can never do on your own. 

All the behind-the-scenes films are just phenomenal Salesforce user case study films. They’re wildly different from anything we’ve put out before, because it’s a look behind the scenes at how MrBeast does what he does. That’s going to be fascinating for everybody, too. And I can’t wait to see what happens.

Dive deeper:

• Enter the contest at https://mrbeast.salesforce.com/
• Meet Slackbot, your new agentic work OS BFF
• Let’s talk: How conversation design enables the Agentic Enterprise