Beyond Super Bowl Ads
What OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and Amazon do not tell you about their AI business models | Edition #272
This year, tech companies again decided to showcase their AI products through Super Bowl ads, including top players in AI, such as OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and Amazon.
As everyone knows, especially advertising professionals know, ads very often do not offer an unbiased and detailed description of the product.
On the contrary, they are commonly inspirational, evoking a targeted emotion, provoking a competitor, popularizing a collective stance, or tapping into an idealized perception of the brand or the items it sells.
Ads are powerful. They can help companies rise (such as Apple's iconic “1984” Super Bowl ad), or lead to public backlash and reputational harm (such as Pepsi's Kendall Jenner ad).
With that in mind, let us take a look at what OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and Amazon showcased during the Super Bowl, an event watched by more than 130 million people, and what lies behind the strategic advertising veil.
1. OpenAI
OpenAI’s ad was a beautiful, nostalgia-fostering clip titled “You Can Just Build Things,” promoting Codex, the company's recently launched AI coding agent.
From the Young Fathers’ “Pals” track to the 1990s-style sequence of images revering human intelligence and ingenuity, the ad made millennials like me fall into an inspired one-minute trance.
It turns out that this is not peak avant-garde cinema; it is an AI company promoting an AI agent and its brand as a supposedly human ingenuity-fostering organization.
The company's track record, however, does not seem to send the same pro-human message.
This is the same company that has launched an extremely sycophantic and emotionally manipulative AI chatbot in 2024 (GPT 4o), which created millions of loyal users, but led to various cases of mental health harm and suicides (whose families are now suing it).
This is also a company currently being sued by authors and publishers over copyright infringement, presumably because it was cheaper to just use easy-to-grab data instead of negotiating fair licensing deals with the copyright holders.
2. Google
Google's ad is titled “New Home,” and it promotes Gemini's AI assistant features, including searching through a user's photos and performing generative AI edits with a user's personal images.
In typical Google fashion, the company went deep into emotional bonds and family connections (remember "Dear Sophie"?), this time with clips of a boy growing, a mother and son hugging, and the boy and his dog playing.
With the family-oriented imagery and soundtrack, we almost forget that we are actually watching an ad for an AI tool that is often privacy-invasive, broadly scanning users’ Google accounts through Gmail, Google Photos, Google Drive, and other services under the excuse of “increased productivity” and “personalization”.
Over the past two years, it has become clear that Google’s main strategy in the AI race is to accelerate the deskilling process by embedding “smart features” into its existing services, ultimately shoving AI down the throats of its billions of users.
That is a fast way to increase its usage numbers and make claims about Gemini’s popularity.
It seems to me that to implement such an aggressive “AI first” strategy is the opposite of child-development-friendly or family-aligned. Especially when users are constantly prompted to “ask AI to help…” and almost subconsciously reminded that they are not enough without AI.
3. Anthropic
Anthropic created four ads poking fun at and criticizing OpenAI's recent announcement that it would roll out ads on ChatGPT.
The ad actually shown during the Super Bowl was titled “Can I get a six pack quickly?”
Many seem to have appreciated Anthropic’s firm stance against AI chatbot ads; many also envision the company as the eternal “good guys” of the AI industry.
So let me share an unpopular opinion about Anthropic:
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