The Washington Post asked experts in marketing and political campaign messaging to analyse four AI TV commercials set to air during this year\u2019s Super Bowl or that appeared in recent months to see how the messages are trying to win over an AI-sceptical public. The campaigns tout how AI might improve a young man\u2019s love life, help a mother and son decorate their new home or preserve jobs in small-town America.<\/p>\n
Google Gemini for imagining your dreams<\/p>\n
The pitch: In the Google Super Bowl ad, a mother and young son use its Gemini chatbot to visualise what his room and their garden could look like in a new home they\u2019re moving into.<\/p>\n
Does the message work? Advertising and brand messaging experts raved about several Google advertisements in the past year that pitch its AI as helping people clarify what matters in their lives and work. Most featured parents and children and hit viewers over the head with warm-and-fuzzies.<\/p>\n
Angeli Gianchandani, a New York University adjunct professor who specialises in brand strategy and communications, said it\u2019s smart for Google to pitch AI that offers \u201creassurance\u201d and emotional connection rather than just practical capabilities. \u201cThe next era of AI marketing will not be won by showing what machines can do, but by clarifying what humans still own,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Marketing experts said that Google\u2019s AI messaging has come a long way from a botched advertisement a couple of years ago. In that ad, a dad asks Gemini to help his daughter write a fan letter to her sports hero. Critics were turned off by the idea of outsourcing a childhood rite of passage to a machine. Google yanked the ad, which was in heavy rotation during the 2024 Olympics.<\/p>\n
MediaRadar, which tracks advertising for corporate clients, estimates that companies spent more than $1.7 billion last year on advertisements related to AI on TV, streaming services, social media, billboards and more.<\/p>\n
That splurge is a relatively small slice of the $400 billion spent in total on advertising in the US last year, excluding political ads, according to Luke Stillman at the technology and media consulting firm Madison and Wall.<\/p>\n
Advertising analysts also cautioned that Amazon, Google and other technology companies are already big spenders on ads, and it\u2019s not clear how much AI is adding to their typical marketing tally.<\/p>\n
ChatGPT as romantic wingman<\/p>\n
The pitch: A young man making dinner for a date asks ChatGPT to recommend a recipe that \u201csays, \u2018I like you but want to play it cool.\u2019\u201d His date looks impressed with the pasta dish that ChatGPT suggested.<\/p>\n
(OpenAI is planning a different commercial for the Super Bowl, CEO Sam Altman suggested in a post on X this week. The company didn\u2019t make Sunday\u2019s ad available before the game. The Washington Post has a content partnership with OpenAI.)<\/p>\n
Does the message work? This ad and similar ones for ChatGPT were polarising among marketing and advertising experts consulted by The Post.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey\u2019re emotionally sweet. They make you feel okay about the company,\u201d said Allen Adamson, a brand strategist and co-founder of marketing firm Metaforce.<\/p>\n
But Joe Burns, head of strategy at the advertising agency Quality Meats Creative, got the ick from the implication that ChatGPT can help men seduce women.<\/p>\n
He also said that OpenAI had fallen into a common marketing trap for technology companies, which often pitch their products as tools to maximise human efficiency. Burns said that isn\u2019t effective. \u201cAdvertising works because human beings are fundamentally irrational creatures,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
A different approach, Burns said, could show how ChatGPT can expand human capacity and ingenuity. He imagined an ad showing a woman with dreams of starting a baking business using the chatbot to get started with a stall at a farmers market, creating flyers and promoting the business online.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe thing that I find brilliant about AI is it lowers the bar of effort of all the possible things you can do,\u201d Burns said.<\/p>\n
Claude\u2019s swipe at ChatGPT<\/p>\n
The pitch: A spindly young man struggling to perform a pull-up asks a chatbot, embodied by a muscular fitness god, for advice. The muscly deity pauses between replies like a laggy AI app and then blurts out a promotion for shoe insoles.<\/p>\n
Does the message work? The planned Super Bowl commercial for Anthropic\u2019s Claude mocks ChatGPT\u2019s recent addition of advertising messages to the widely used chatbot. The Claude ad also echoes a recent ChatGPT commercial that also featured a young man struggling with pull-ups.<\/p>\n
\u201cA war has started,\u201d said Sandy Greenberg, co-founder and CEO of advertising agency Terri & Sandy.<\/p>\n
Greenberg said it was brilliant of Anthropic, whose chatbot is much less popular than ChatGPT, to position itself as the kinder, gentler AI helper and to home in on people\u2019s anxieties about chatbot ads harnessing what they privately confide to AI.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was a smart, strategic move \u2013 tapping directly into a fear consumers already have to strike a very real chord,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
The ad got under the skin of OpenAI executives. In Altman\u2019s X post about Super Bowl ads, he called the Anthropic commercial \u201cdishonest\u201d.<\/p>\n
Greenberg said that marketing is often inherently divisive but it\u2019s much more acute for AI.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople are not rooting for AI,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s going to be more likely that your ads can be polarising just by the nature of you\u2019re on a topic that people hate.\u201d<\/p>\n
Meta says that AI creates jobs<\/p>\n
The pitch: A man in rural New Mexico says he landed a good job in his hometown at a Meta data centre. It\u2019s interspersed with scenes from a rodeo and other folksy tropes.<\/p>\n
Does the message work? The TV commercial, and a similar one set in Iowa, have aired in Washington, DC, and a handful of other communities. The targeting suggests the pitch is aimed at convincing elected officials and their constituents of the economic and job opportunities from AI.<\/p>\n
Prominent politicians, including Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R), have called for restrictions on data centre developments after backlash against the facilities from some communities.<\/p>\n
Burns said that while the ad isn\u2019t subtle or creative, it is effective at giving national and local elected officials a \u201cnarrative off-the-shelf\u201d that AI data centre projects create jobs. He said that advertising\u2019s goal is forging those kinds of mental shortcuts \u2013 like seeing the yellow Cheerios box in a sea of supermarket cereals and reflexively picking up that brand.<\/p>\n
But Wilson, the Republican digital strategist, said that Americans are generally \u201cvery sceptical\u201d about job creation promises from technology companies. Communities in blue and red states alike have baulked at local construction of hulking, electricity-hungry computing hubs used to power AI.<\/p>\n
Greenberg said that Meta is taking a risk that its job creation messages become fodder for critics if AI proves to be a massive job-destroying force.<\/p>\n
Adamson, from Metaforce, said that a perennial question about advertising is whether it can fix bad vibes about a product. \u201cThe answer since the dawn of marketing and advertising is no,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Sign up to Herald Premium Editor\u2019s Picks<\/a>, delivered straight to your inbox every Friday. Editor-in-Chief Murray Kirkness picks the week\u2019s best features, interviews and investigations. Sign up for Herald Premium here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Washington Post asked experts in marketing and political campaign messaging to analyse four AI TV commercials set…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":274331,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[3113,365,6336,6015,9556,363,364,51237,198,307,17890,15559,6101,226,2454,9557,13840,2882,5812,130,2686,111,139,4061,69,10711,84609,1305,4525,313,23123,145,165,2846,24359,8229,3382,377],"class_list":["post-274330","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ads","tag-ai","tag-americans","tag-apps","tag-artificial","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-bowl","tag-can","tag-dont","tag-doubt","tag-elected","tag-good","tag-growing","tag-industry","tag-intelligence","tag-like","tag-love","tag-make","tag-more","tag-moving","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-number","tag-nz","tag-officials","tag-restrict","tag-show","tag-something","tag-super","tag-surveys","tag-technology","tag-their","tag-them","tag-these","tag-they","tag-using","tag-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274330","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=274330"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274330\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/274331"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=274330"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=274330"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=274330"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}