a blog by Ian Kennedy
Anthropic, makers of AI Assistant Claude, is going after their competition with a series of ads to designed to give users pause after the Open AI’s announcement that ads would be coming to their product, Chat GPT.
The campaign, Time and a Place, was envisioned by Mother London, extending Claude’s positioning from the Keep Thinking campaign.
The ads launched yesterday, timed for this weekend’s Super Bowl, which will feature two of the spots as detailed by AdWeek.
Super Bowl 56 featured ads from many car companies introducing their Electronic Vehicles (EV) as well as a few crypto companies.
The failed attempt at the most innovative ad was goes to Coinbase which featured 60-seconds of a floating QR code (for those that were in the know, that graphic was an homage to an episode of The Office) Unfortunately their site crashed so the $14 million the company spent to hopefully acquire new users went to waste and Coinbase will forever be associated with the QR code that crashed their website.
A personal favorite of mine was from the FTX which featured Larry David (who has never featured in an ad spot until now) as the ever-present skeptic who misses out on all the great inventions of history. The ad’s theme plays right into the older generation’s FOMO and played in the premium spot right before the Super Bowl’s halftime show.
The tear jerker of the night was from Toyota which ran before the game even got under way. The spot told the story of the McKeever brothers from Canada who worked together to achieve greatness in Nordic Paralympic skiing. Brothers is a moving 60-seconds worth watching if you haven’t seen it. Here’s the backstory.
Of all the EV commercials trotted out over the course of the game, Polestar’s anti-ad was most effective for me. Taking aim at the market leaders VW (“no dieselgate”) and Tesla (“no conquering Mars”) Polestar’s spot doesn’t even show you much of their car which immediately piques your interest in who they might be?
What was your favorite?
So the game was not that interesting – like watching trench warfare – resulting in one of the lowest scoring Super Bowl games on record. Someone said it was like both teams knew the winner was going to have to eat fast food at the White House.
Even the half-time show was a disaster as Maroon 5’s lead singer strutted out in a designer tank top that looked remarkably similar to Target’s throw pillow covers.
Instead, here’s a selection of commentary on the advertisements. At $5 million a pop, it’s the grand showcase of the creative output of our economy so worth paying attention to see what advertisers think will get our attention.
SBNation did a frame-by-frame analysis of the NFL commercial to identify all the players.
If you were paying attention to the Expensify commercial, using the app to take a photo of the receipt in the video would automatically enter you into a contest. Clever!
Verizon underscored that they are often the network of choice for first responders. Here is the backstory behind how LA Chargers coach Anthony Lynn ended up in the emergency room.
AdAge tells the story of how executives at Burger King acquired the rights to the Andy Warhol film of him eating a Whopper and why they didn’t run the entire 15-minute film.
Jason Bateman operates an elevator in a building that stops at all the things we sometimes have to do but would rather not. Middle row seats, root canals and jury duty are unfortunate but unavoidable and Bateman is a modern day Virgil from Dante’s Divine Comedy. But vegans didn’t take to kindly in Hyundai’s dig at their beet salad dinner.
Pringles, TurboTax and Michelob all poked fun at our dystopian future. Who can forget the dark nod to the famous Ronald Regan campaign ad Morning in America by Hulu and The Handmaid’s Tale.
Doritos expressed how adding spice to an original can make things fresh by having Chance the Rapper remix the Backstreet Boys and it was pretty awesome.
Michelob hired Zoe Kravitz to introduce the internet sensation that is ASMR to the Super Bowl crowd and used it to sell beer.
It was five years since Bob Dylan was first used in a Super Bowl ad (for Chrysler) so the use of Blowin in the Wind in a Budweiser commercial didn’t raise too many eyebrows. What was surprising was the backlash from the fossil fuel industry.
Bud Light had several commercials including a weird hybrid one where Bud Light gets killed off by Game of Thrones (?). Budweiser also highlighted that they are one of the few beers to list their ingredients of which corn syrup is not one of them (not like Miller Lite or Coors). The National Corn Growers Association was not pleased.
Amazon hired Harrison Ford and Forrest Whitaker to explain why Alexa-everywhere might not be such a good idea. (regular readers of TWTW will recall Rocco, the Alexa-obsessed parrot) This follows last year’s Alexa spot which featured Cardi B, Gordon Ramsey, Rebel Wilson and Sir Anthony Hopkins.
Cardi B turned down a chance to perform at the halftime (in solidarity with Colin Kaepernick) but she did get to make an entrance in a totally-over-the-top Pepsi commercial.
Google, on the other hand, played down their technology and focused on the human side of what they enable.
Two ads tipped their hat to female football players. The NFL ad featured Samantha Gordon and Toyota featured Toni Harris.
Finally, the male-oriented Dodge Ram pickup truck broke tradition and celebrated the strong women of the future. The other Dodge Ram advert was brilliantly meta.
4th quarter, just over 2 minutes to go, Patriots are down by 8. Julian Edelman grabs the pass while surrounded by three defenders, not only grabs the pass, snags it just after it bounced off one of the defender’s knees.
This was the turning point. The Pats moved it down the field to tie it up after a two point conversion and then win in sudden death overtime.
Just posting this here because I’m sure I’ll be looking for this video in the future.
They say this commercial was in development for a long time so they either had a few alternates ready to go or were just extremely prescient. Either way, Budweiser’s Super Bowl ad airing this Sunday will be sure to tap into what is on everyone’s mind in a way that only a few national brands can do when everyone is looking to grab the spotlight.
By telling the origin story of Adophus Busch’s journey from Germany to America in the mid-1800’s to found his brewery in St. Louis, Budweiser enters the national conversation with its own take on the contribution immigrants have made to this country.
See if you can spot the cameo of the famous Clydesdales who normally are front and center in their national TV commercials.
– via Advertising Age
The circus has left town but that’s not to say the city didn’t get the chance to poke a little fun at the NFL’s self-importance.
It’s Super Bowl Sunday, one of the most controlled sporting events on the planet. While it’s not exactly rigged, every aspect of the game has been optimized for maximum viewing audience engagement. Sure, there’s a football game in there somewhere but every variable has been carefully engineered to maximize viewing enjoyment.
Some suspect that the two week media circus around Richard Sherman was a carefully planned media campaign designed to put Sherman, and his sponsor, the headphone maker Beats, into the spotlight. With all the attention on social media around the event, it’s no surprise that there are social media hashtag strategies of each brand hoping to cash in. Advertisers, eager to build up anticipation of the big event, are previewed snippets of their big 60 second spot during the playoff games. Our emotions have been conditioned to peak around mid-day today as they kick off to the fading strains of the National Anthem.
As long as people are going to control all the variables around the game, why not engineer the game itself? Jon Bois over at SB Nation has a column where he hacks around with the settings of the XBox video game Madden to come up with fantastical characters to face each other on the virtual gridiron. In this week’s finale, he puts the 7 foot 400 pound Seattle Seahawks up against the 5 foot 160 pound Denver Broncos. And he didn’t stop there. He also slides all the ability, stamina, and strength settings to “11” for the Seahawks and turns all the Broncos players settings down to zero.
He wrote about the resulting game in his column, The Machine is Bleeding to Death, a hilarious piece complete with animated gifs highlighting the best bits. It’s a distorted, comic book caricature of the contest being played out on a gaming platform designed to look as real as possible. The best sports writing is at once about the game but more broadly about society and the world around us thru the lens of the game. Jon Bois’ review of the video game of the football game which we are all about to watch is social commentary at its best.
May the best team win today. Despite the odds.