Emma Stone Just Burned a Laptop Over a Domain Name. She's Not Wrong.

Tomorrow night, somewhere between the first and second quarters of Super Bowl LX, around 120 million viewers will watch Emma Stone have a meltdown.

Not a real one. A cinematic one. Shot on black-and-white analogue film by Yorgos Lanthimos, the director behind Poor Things and The Favourite, the 30-second Squarespace spot titled "Unavailable" follows Stone as she tries to register emmastone.com, only to discover that someone else already owns it. What follows is a beautifully shot, darkly funny spiral of frustration: smashed laptops, burned devices, and the quiet rage of realising that a piece of your identity belongs to a stranger.

It's a Squarespace ad. It's selling domain registration. And it might be the most important thing the platform has ever put on television.

The Ad, and Why It Works

Squarespace has been doing Super Bowl ads for twelve years now. That's remarkable consistency for a website builder. While other tech companies have come and gone from the Big Game (remember when GoDaddy ads were just... whatever those were?), Squarespace has turned up every year with increasingly ambitious creative. Last year it was Barry Keoghan and Martin Scorsese. This year it's Emma Stone and Lanthimos.

What makes "Unavailable" different from most Super Bowl ads is what it's not doing. It's not trying to be funny in the way that Super Bowl spots usually are, with a celebrity doing something wacky and a punchline in the final three seconds. It's playing it dead straight. The black-and-white film stock, the suspenseful score, the Lanthimos wide shots: this looks and feels like the opening of an arthouse thriller. The comedy comes from the contrast between the cinematic intensity and the mundanity of the problem. She's not fighting a villain. She's trying to buy a URL.

And here's the detail that elevates it from clever advertising to something genuinely resonant: it's based on a true story. Emma Stone, the actual person, didn't own emmastone.com. According to Stone herself, "This commercial is based on true events. Having the opportunity to play myself in my own home was a joy and a memory I won't soon forget, despite the pain that came rushing back."

That's not a scripted testimonial. That's a real frustration, experienced by one of the most recognisable people on the planet, turned into a thirty-second film. If Emma Stone can lose control of her own name online, what chance do the rest of us have?

The Actual Problem

Here's where the ad stops being an ad and starts being a public service announcement, which, incidentally, is exactly what one of the companion films in the campaign is called: "A Message from Emma Stone," a PSA-style piece warning viewers about what happens when you wait too long to secure your domain.

The domain name issue is real, and it's more common than most people think. We see it constantly in our work with small business clients. Someone starts a business, builds a following on social media, designs their logo, prints their business cards, and then, months or sometimes years later, gets around to building a website. By which point their ideal domain name is taken. Sometimes by a competitor. Sometimes by a domain squatter who bought it speculatively and now wants £500, or £5,000, to sell it back. Sometimes by a completely unrelated person or business who just happened to get there first.

The result is a compromise. Instead of yourbusiness.com, you end up with yourbusiness.co.uk, or yourbusinessofficial.com, or yourbusiness-studio.com, or some other variation that's almost right but not quite. And that "not quite" follows you around forever, printed on every card, typed into every email signature, slightly undermining the professional image you're trying to build.

A domain costs, at most, around £15 to £20 per year. There is no reason to wait. Even if you're not ready to build a website, even if you're still figuring out your business name, even if the website is months away: register the domain. You can point it at your Instagram profile or your Linktree in the meantime. You can park it. You can do literally nothing with it except own it. The point is that it's yours, and nobody else can take it.

What Squarespace Gets Right (And What Most Website Builders Get Wrong)

The broader Squarespace Super Bowl strategy, across twelve years of campaigns, has been remarkably consistent. They don't sell features. They don't talk about drag-and-drop editors or responsive templates or e-commerce integrations. They sell the idea that having your own website is an act of ambition, identity, and independence.

The 2025 ad with Barry Keoghan and Martin Scorsese framed website building as filmmaking. This year's ad frames domain ownership as identity protection. Both approaches treat the website not as a technical product but as something fundamentally personal. Your website is you, online. Your domain is your name, online. Losing either one is losing a piece of yourself.

This is the thing that most website builders get wrong in their marketing. They lead with the tool: "look how easy our editor is," "look at our templates," "we have AI now." Squarespace leads with the why. Why does having a website matter? Because it's yours. Because your Instagram could vanish tomorrow. Because your domain is the one piece of digital real estate that actually belongs to you.

It's a message that lands differently after January 2025, when TikTok went dark for twelve hours and 170 million users in the United States briefly lost access to the platform they'd built their careers on. The creator economy collectively panicked, and the lesson was clear: platforms are borrowed land. Your website is owned land. Squarespace doesn't reference TikTok in the ad, but it doesn't need to. The cultural context does the work.

What This Means for You

If you're watching the Super Bowl tomorrow (or, more likely, watching the ads on YouTube on Monday morning), take "Unavailable" as a prompt. Not to buy a Squarespace plan specifically, although obviously we think that's a solid choice. But to ask yourself three questions.

Do you own your domain name? Not "does your website exist," but do you personally or does your business own the domain registration? Check your registrar. Make sure the email address on the account is yours. Make sure you know when it renews and that your payment method is current. We've seen businesses lose their domains because a credit card expired and the renewal failed silently.

Is your domain your actual name or business name? If you're trading as Bloom & Thistle Floristry but your website is bloom-and-thistle-floristry-uk.squarespace.com, you have a problem that's costing you credibility every single day. A custom domain on Squarespace costs nothing extra, it's included with every annual plan. There's no excuse for not having one.

Do you have a website at all, or are you still relying entirely on social media? If the answer is the latter, Emma Stone's frustration is a preview of yours. The difference is that she can hire a film crew to dramatise it. You'll just be quietly annoyed while your competitors, who do have websites, pick up the enquiries you're missing.

The Bigger Picture

Squarespace reportedly pays around $7 million for a Super Bowl ad spot, before production costs. That's a staggering amount of money to spend on thirty seconds of television. But the message they're buying airtime for is, genuinely, one of the most important ideas in small business: own your name online before someone else does.

We build Squarespace websites for a living, so we're obviously biased. But we'd say this even if Squarespace didn't exist: get your domain. Today. Before you need it. Before someone else buys it. Before you find yourself, like Emma Stone, staring at a screen that says "unavailable" where your name should be.

The ad is funny. The problem isn't.