The Best and Worst of Super Bowl Advertising

Earlier this week I published my usual annual recap of the best and worst ads from the Super Bowl. In the days after I wrote that piece, I read many more stories about what stood out for people and for critics. Plenty commented on how the Super Bowl essentially proved that the entire US economy right now may be propped up by AI, cryptocurrency, weight loss drugs and gambling. Several talked about the lack of breakthrough creativity (which I also spotlighted). For me the biggest losers and winners in terms of marketing strategy were all about AI.

The best strategy was Anthropic positioning Claude as different because they were not accepting ads. The brilliant satire of what was clearly meant to be a typically inhuman sounding ChatGPT query result was relatable to anyone who has used AI and their message was an example of us vs. them at its finest. As one article noted, this was the best execution of this strategy since the "I'm a Mac" series of ads that differentiated Apple from PC makers.

The biggest losers were also AI focused. Genspark's tone deaf spot asking AI to "dial in this spreadsheet" while suggesting that people "take a day off" felt like a middle finger to anyone who has angst about how AI might affect their job or career ... which is a lot of people.

And the worst ad of the day came from Amazon Alexa where they imagined and visualized all the ways that AI might plot to kill you. So the strategy was to make people more afraid of AI or perhaps to prove that Alexa has an emerging skill in finding unusual ways to kill you?

As one commenter on YouTube noted: "I think this ad was made by AI except that the AI forgot to mask what it actually wants to do to us humans."

Read the full article and then comment on LinkedIn to let me know if there are any you disagree with or what I missed!