Advertising Intelligence

Oliver Henry ’26

The Super Bowl is the advertising event of the year for any company, though not necessarily because of the size of the audience. If the goal of an ad campaign is simply to reach millions, this can be achieved by many, lower-profile ads— which would still be cheaper than shelling out millions for thirty seconds of the big game. But the value of a Super Bowl spot has very little to do with how many people’s attention there is to get. It’s all about the attention itself.

For the other twelve months of the year, the attitude of the average consumer towards advertising is something between impatience and disdain. On or offline, the world is so saturated by ads that you learn to tune them out. This perpetual tide of bright colors and enthusiastic marketing washes over us all, without much of a conscious effect.

The Super Bowl is different. This winter day is perhaps the only one in the year in which the collective attention of the people is given, freely and of its own volition, to watching ads. You might look down on this practice: consumers brainwashed into happily lining the trough, excited to be sold to. Or you might think it’s a harmless diversion in between downs. Either way, it’s a quintessentially American tradition – in some ways even more so than the football game it interrupts.

There’s a sense of self-awareness in watching Super Bowl ads. For an afternoon, you see yourself as those companies see you: a rounding error on a giant spreadsheet, a single digit of “approve” or “disapprove” in the flock of millions. This realization is, in a way, empowering. You can slouch back, open the guacamole, and enjoy the attempts at courting the 0.00000000293 of GDP with your name on it.

So, on this special day, the one opportunity for an advertiser to have their message received not as the white noise of daily life, but instead with open ears, it matters what they choose to say. Whatever they choose to broadcast is a glimpse into their corporate soul; if we could brush away the huge CGI budgets and cameos from washed-up sitcom actors, the real message might be there underneath in its pure form.

The most fruitful target for this kind of analysis might be the artificial intelligence industry, which in its fledgling state, has a lot to prove to potential customers. So, unsurprisingly, both the so-called big three AI model providers — Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic — and a number of smaller enterprises used the Super Bowl as an opportunity to make a showing.

At this point, we should make the important distinction between advertisements that use AI and advertisements about AI. There’s an intriguing lack of overlap in these categories: companies selling AI seldom use it themselves for marketing. The Super Bowl’s only explicitly AI-generated advertisement wasn’t even tech-related at all; it was a garish Svedka vodka spot. On the other hand, Anthropic’s commercials tend to be homely, almost sappy. Ads for their Claude line of chatbots feature old archival footage, shots of retro calculators, orange doodles, and people— lots of them. Despite their subject, these ads feel much more “human” than those for detergent or cell service, by design. The ads’ reliance on an exaggerated sentimentality is a clear reaction to public fears about this technology’s potential consequences for human relationships and culture.

A recent campaign for ChatGPT took this sentimental aesthetic to an extreme by not depicting any digital devices at all. The scenarios — a date, fixing a pickup truck — are warmly lit and clearly shot on film, with ChatGPT outputs superimposed over them in a minimalist way. The intended message is presumably that these familiar, intimate moments aren’t incompatible with artificial intelligence but actually could be improved by it. You can judge for yourself how persuasive this is.

Oddly enough, given how cutting-edge they are, AI companies’ attempts to play on coziness and humanity often verge into nostalgia. ChatGPT’s Super Bowl ad was an extended montage of tinkering, scribbling, and coding; perhaps the intention was to show AI as a natural evolution of these activities, but it’s strange to so fondly depict something that their product is poised to make obsolete.

Artificial intelligence companies may also use such wholesome scenarios in their advertising to gloss over the sketchier implications of their technology. The previously mentioned Claude commercial uses clips like a young girl coding something and a backyard rocket launch, but there are far less cutesy applications. The Washington Post recently reported that Claude was used in the abduction of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro. Google, which has provided their AI services to the Israeli military, among other dubious contracts, aired a Super Bowl ad for their Gemini chatbot in the form of a conversation between a mother and squeaky-voiced young child. In fairness, though, laundering an ad’s message by having a sweet and innocent child deliver it is nothing new: the NFL did something similar in their PSA this year, as did the “He Gets Us” campaign in previous years.

Even setting aside these more drastic uses of AI, advertisements tend to shy away from what is still, by far, the most popular consumer use for large language models: cheating on homework. (OpenAI has released data showing massive drops in ChatGPT traffic when June rolls around). This isn’t necessarily because the companies are ashamed of this, exactly; it’s just that you attract less investors by depicting your product as a mundane study tool than you can by making it out as a revolutionary, life-changing innovation.

There’s one particular AI ad that aired during the Super Bowl that I think is a fitting encapsulation of how bizarre this moment is. It was a cryptic one: the only visual cues were glowing orbs on a dark background, with vague text imploring the viewer to visit “ai.com.” The site’s domain name, along with the half-minute of ad time, had cost about $80,000,000. During the fourth quarter, while the Seahawks mopped up, the ad went on the air. But it failed to seize its moment – the eighty-million-dollar site immediately crashed.