“Arsenic and Old Lace,” 1944, Warner Bros.
“Look I probably should have told you this before, but you see… well… insanity runs in my family… It practically gallops!” – Mortimer Brewster, “Arsenic and Old Lace,” 1944, Warner Bros.
It was marvelous…stupendous…watched by an estimated 127M plus people…and the only thing more lackluster than the game were the tech companies trying to make AI interesting, friendly and beneficial.
Even the generous overlay of star power and topnotch creative talent couldn’t boost the benefits of the technology and deliver reassuring benefits to folks.
Making tech hip … failed.
We’re talking about the latest overhyped, super expensive Super Bowl LIX that helped sell an estimated 1.25B chicken wings, 12.5M pizzas and 325M gallons of beer.
To have their company’s name in front of all of those people, firms paid a whopping record of $800M in $8M/30 sec chunks.
Oh yeah, the talent/production cost was on top of that – probably 3-4 times the airtime cost.
If you’re one who missed it … congratulations, you didn’t have to feel sorry for the advertisers who wasted their money and viewers’ time.
Honestly, the Super Bowl ad excitement began to fade back in the early 1980s.
Source – Pepsi
Pepsi set the bar back in 1980 with the Mean Joe Greene ad that was the complete package – empathy, emotional depth, intuition, human experience plus a connection that invited you in … and kept you.
It wasn’t until 1984 when Apple ran their famed (some would say worshiped) 1984 ad for the Mac. Directed by Alien, Blade Runner director; Steve Jobs ignored the board of directors “no go” decision, ran the ad once and set the bar for tech advertising so high-tech bosses don’t even try to equal its impact.
And before this year’s tech industry rush, we had another failed attempt … 2022, the year of cryptocurrency dominance.
Don’t get us wrong, crypto is still around for the believers.
As long as the computer stays plugged in, you could have a net worth of millions, even billions as long as you can find another believer to buy it or take it in trade.
The cybercurrency ads flooded the big game, promising the end of physical currency with online payments and wealth accumulation but the NFL, networks and most of the talent/production crews settled for hard currency payments.
Tough – Sam Bankman-Fried (l) lost his freedom with his crypto scheme and James Howells lost his hard drive in a huge mound of garbage.
Granted, months after FTX ran their Super Bowl ad, CEO Sam Bankman-Fried was charged with fraud and bilking folks out of billions of dollars; and last year, was sentenced to 25 years in prison.
And the folks who “invested” with him? Gee … sorry.
But people still like money they can’t really see or spend in the local Walmart.
Take British IT worker James Howells.
He mined (by his estimates) more than $700M in cybercurrency onto a hard drive that somehow found its way to the Newport, South Wales landfill and is now located under 25,000 cubic meters of … garbage.
And that brings us up to the next game changer that tech firms did their damndest to make warm, cuddly, friendly and helpful … AI.
Don’t get us wrong, we think there’s some benefits in AI and it will be part of our lives … eventually.
McKinsey, respected industry consultants, say that AI will drive the next industrial revolution comparable to the one that came about following the introduction of the steam engine.
They, and others, project that by 2030, the global AI economic activity will total about $13T.
Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, says AI will be the single most powerful force of our time; and over the long haul, we believe he’s right.
The wave of unbridled enthusiasm and use in anything/everything is going to slow its progress.
There are techies who say AI can/will do everything for us and people can just sit back and relax.
Nope … the human has got to be involved at every step!
Don’t believe us?
Take the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.
Not a lot of people know how close Russia and the US came to all-out nuclear war.
Soviet nuclear submarine B-59 with three senior officers on board and they all had to agree to launch a missile.
Vasili Arkhipov used a strong touch of humanity, calmed the captain down and nuclear war was averted.
Had AI been in charge, without human logic/intervention, the landscape of our planet would look substantially different today.
Don’t get us wrong, AI is coming and being progressively/aggressively used, abused, misused for … everything.
AI Race – Every country and all tech entrepreneurs are rushing to get their AI technology out there first to reap major financial returns and business advantage.
In every corner of the globe, investment and work on developing the best, most advanced, most comprehensive AI is being carried out at breakneck speed.
Little to no attention is given to whether it makes sense for some uses or what will happen when it’s free to roam the world.
Super Bowl LIX ads were perfect examples.
People who know how to create great selling and entertaining content are finding it difficult to put creativity first and override the rush to prove they’re ahead of the technology curve.
But still, most of the consumer brand ads stuffed into this year’s Super Bowl weren’t bad … just safe.
The NFL Somebody ad was one of those ads that shouldn’t have to be made and seen but it obviously resonated with a lot of people because individuals are individuals and … they’re important.
And in the rush to hype/promote/use, AI everywhere and in everything it’s sorta nice to highlight the human part of humanity.
Lays was another ad that avoided the reliance on star power and technology, just telling the story that potato chips are there because of and for real people.
No eyepopping AI technology that makes stuff appear before our eyes. No need to muddy the message.
Ah, but just to muck things up, the AI techies had to prove they were so with it and they/their technologies knew what folks wanted.
Yeah … right!
Seal as a seal is about as AI inventive as you can get.
Our daughter stared and said huh? Our son simply said WTF!
AI decided that putting Seal on a bunch of rocks with other marine animals would appeal to Gen Zers.
But it did prove that AI tends to be homogenous and lacks any creative thinking. Instead, jumping the shark is logical … right?
The tragedy was that someone had to be so blinded by the “power” of the technology that they let it drive the project without a healthy dose of creative common sense.
Zuckerberg’s Meta played up how appealing their Ray-Ban AI-tech smart glasses were that three expensive celebrities – Chris Pratt, Chris Hemsworth, Kris Jenner – would add street cred to their always on, always tracking AI-technology glasses.
Zuckerberg could have saved the money and instead of firing thousands of folks to replace them with smarter people, used the money to return AI fact-checking to his social media sites.
Instead, it would be more interesting, entertaining if you wore the glasses to give him more data to …
Matthew McConaughey, who was busy in a number of the Bowl ads, reinforced the fact that there was no reason to think for yourself when AI takes over. If it gives you a table outside in the rain and gives you shrimp cocktail, accept it because well, AI knows the answer better than you do.
But it was less insulting to people who think and act than Google’s Gemini ad which said Gouda cheese sales were up because AI was writing the product’s promotion better than a normal guy could do, so kick back and relax.
O.K., so Gouda sales aren’t really that strong and people really can string words into sentences; but other than that, AI for everything makes total sense.
If you need a real example of asking a techie for an answer to your problem, the answer is always their product regardless of the question, just check the OpenAI ad.
To show that AI and humans can/should work harmoniously together, the ad puts their AI front and center, alpha omega … done and done.
Flesh-and-blood creatives? Not necessary.
The technology did it all, did it better, so move along. Perfection was achieved without … you.
Whether they were consumer products or AI stuff itself being promoted, this year’s Bowl ads did little to make people more comfortable with the technology because it was painfully obvious that even marketing and creative folks were confused as to where it fit in the business of business and day-to-day life.
The technology obviously has potential and can be helpful in improving things down the road. But half-baked or poorly executed ads only reinforce the fact that releasing the technology into the real world without a lot of testing, robust usage guidelines and clear, concise goals is downright dumb and dangerous.
Despite the rush of feel-good Super Bowl ads, AI firms really want the rest of us to do as Abby Brewester said in Arsenic and Old Lace, “Now, Mortimer, you know all about it and just forget about it.”
But the challenges and risks are a lot more involved and there’s more at stake than an annual sporting event, even when the game was so underwhelming.
There’s little doubt that the technology is going to be part of our personal and professional lives but there are healthy questions as to its blanket value as well as the real impact/benefits for humans and humanity.
Maybe at next year’s contest things will be better/clearer/more realistic and the game will be more …interesting.
Better yet, it will be a contest people the world over are interested in … futbol.
# # #
Andy Marken – andy@markencom.com – is an author of more than 800 articles on management, marketing, communications, industry trends in media & entertainment, consumer electronics, software, and applications. An internationally recognized marketing/communications consultant with a broad range of technical and industry expertise especially in storage, storage management and film/video production fields; he has an extended range of relationships with business, industry trade press, online media, and industry analysts/consultants.
