Super Bowl LV: The ads

The Super Bowl went off as advertised again this year. The New England Patriots were back in the Big Game, after an absence and rebuilding efforts given the departure of Tom Brady after the 2019 season. Patriots fans will have to take what solace they can from the fact of their participation in their first Super Bowl since Brady's departure. They are back to the big stage, though not yet back to victorious form there.

I will discuss the game itself tomorrow. Today, the spectacle. There were, as there always are. lots of expensively produced television ads. As usual, these ads mirror American obsessions, especially the obsession as of late with artificial intelligence and whether it is destined to replace the natural human sort.

There were a couple of commercials plugging Anthropic's AI system, Claude, and Anthropic's promise to keep Claude ad free. These, for me, were the stand outs of the show. Good nerdy humor, right up my alley, and the humor was pertinent to the product under discussion.

The first of the ads involved a young man asking a woman, also apparently young, what he should do to improve his communication with his mother. She then gives him, in a level AI-ish monotone, some pertinent-sounding advice of the subject. At the end of the spiel she starts talking about how he might enjoy meeting older women who are NOT his mother, and she offers the name of a website for 'cubs' who want to meet 'cougars'. This is followed by the line, "Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude."

In another ad, a scrawny young fellow is working out. He asks an older man nearby, perhaps a coach, if he can get six-pack abs quickly. The coach, also in a level monotone, gives him sensible advice which again segues into an ad, this time one for in-soles that "add one inch in height and help short kings stand tall." (That might seem less obviously Oedipal than the first and, but a growing Prince might envy Dad his extra height.) And again we are assured that Claude will never include ads.

In fact, one of Claude's competitors, Chat GPT (From OpenAI) does seem to be adding advertisement into its business model.

At any rate, Anthropic wins this blog's award for best Super Bowl ads. The loser, the bottom-feeder ad of the year, also involved AI.

Genspark, the company behind an AI‑powered workspace/automation platform, paid for an ad with Matthew Broderick, playing off his role as Ferris Bueller in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, forty years ago. In the spot, Broderick -- who doesn't seem to have much work in Hollywood these days, because call backs to one's days as a child star must get stale -- encourages people to “take Monday off” because Genspark’s AI can handle their work for them.

This was creepy. "Let's all make ourselves redundant, letting our bosses know how easily we can be replaced -- its like playing hooky forever!" Well, that was the subtext. To whom was Genspark appealing here?

There was also a halftime show from Bad Bunny. You can read about that elsewhere: I have no opinion on it to share. Tomorrow I will say something about the footballgame.

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