Will AI Make The Superb Owl’s Ads Fly?
Marketing Unfiltered #66 → Why Patriots vs Seahawks Is The 2nd Event At The Super Bowl
Welcome back to a special edition of Marketing Unfiltered.
On Friday I shared my 65 leadership and leadership team tips and today Harry and I thought let’s tackle the world’s biggest stage, the Super Bowl ads…
Will AI Make The Superb Owl’s Ads Fly?
Typos aside, the Superbowl is, well, like the Superbowl of advertising.
An absurd, egregious pinnacle of rampant consumerism twinned with rabid tribalism and a healthy smattering of old school American fanfare.
It’s the Guinness Surfer of the sporting calendar (in the US, at least) and a focal point for big brands (well, those with a reported $8 million per ad slot burning a hole in their pocket) who want to embed themselves in popular perception.
For 30 seconds.
On the 8th of February, the New England Patriots will try to dislodge the Seattle Seahawks in Superbowl LX (60) to claim their seventh title.
The Seahawks (from the home of Starbucks), meanwhile, want to double their tally, having only won it once in 2013, when rookie Quarterback Russell Wilson and star running back Marshawn Lynch made mincemeat of Denver’s MVP, Peyton Manning.
As a Brit who became briefly enamoured with College football during a visit to LA back in the mid 2000’s, I won’t be staying up to watch three and a half hours of standing around interspersed with brief glimmers of sporting action. However as a marketer, I watch the Superbowl ad highlights on YouTube religiously every year, partly out of professional curiosity, a little from rubber-necked morbid fascination but mostly to witness peak creative extravagance from a nation for whom excessive grandiosity may as well be a constitutional right.
Year 2 Of AI Ads
Last year, the culmination of the NFL season became known as ‘The AI Super Bowl’ due to the excessive use of artificial intelligence in the ads, and because there were an abundance of cash rich, land grabbing AI tools and platforms advertising.
Sector darling OpenAI opened the bidding with a 60-second black and white arthouse ad about ‘The Intelligence Age’ whilst Google’s Gemini pushed its chatbot, alongside 50+ geo-targeted ads showing how it was effectively the second coming of Christ for small US businesses (ironically, it was busted having edited one of Gemini’s answers about Gouda cheese. Artificial? Definitely. Intelligent? The jury was still out).
Meta’s Ray-Ban AI Glasses had the Tier 1 Hemsworth, Salesforce pulled out whistlin’ Matthew McConaughey, the ever present GoDaddy (surely Go Grandaddy by now?) showed up, the world’s most profligate advertiser Booking dot com did what they always do - all the big names featured with their AI augmented wares. Over the course of the night they wowed global audiences with soft-humoured, ‘amuse everybody/ exclude nobody’ slots designed to demonstrate just how bloody clever and necessary their AI technology was (or just how foolish the audience would be to not leap on their AI party bus as a matter of life and death).
As the volume turns up towards 11 and beyond at this year’s Superbowl, with enough hyperbole, fakery and bullshit to make Karoline Leavitt worry about job security, what can we expect from the AI ad crowd?
The TL;DR is:- LOADS more of the same.
$2.7 Trillion
According to data from CB Insights there are around five hundred privately owned AI unicorns globally, cumulatively valued at a combined $2.7 trillion. Despite their largesse, they’re in a bun fight - an old school, dot Com era Klondike Gold Rush. The simple truth is the world doesn’t need 500 AI behemoths. Some will be ingested into the hungry mouths of their bigger rivals, some will amalgamate with competitors to protect themselves whilst the remainder will go full Icarus, flying too close to the sun before running out of money, ideas and customers before falling to earth in a ball of Dollar-burning flames.
Besides the advertisers, sports fans can expect a creative Scheiße-storm as both AI platforms and traditional brand advertisers whip their agencies into creating ever more outlandish masterpieces which move the needle away from astute, creative advertising insight towards an absurd, brash Hollywoodesque apocalypse. How many creative teams have been held at their laptops at gunpoint, forcibly plugged into the unlimited realms of AI, unimpeded by such wasteful fripperies such as physics, nuance or quality?
My guess is we’ll see more abstract, rainbow coloured assaults on the senses - think a million butterflies for healthcare brands or a billion indulgent burger munchers for fast food. They’ll look impressive, they’ll sound brain numbing but they’ll smell of the desperation seeping from the pores of CMOs who know they need to squeeze eight million Dollars worth of value into a tiny thirty second box, trying desperately to use an AI butter knife as an ineffectual crowbar.
The new kids on the block this year could well be Web3 Prediction Markets.
In a statement, Tim Schlittner, Director of Communications at the NFL, said that
“...six total [betting] ads are permitted from the period leading up to kickoff through the game’s conclusion.”
According to a recent report by Gambling Insider “CFTC-licensed platforms have enjoyed significant activity so far this season. The biggest Prediction Market platform in the US, Kalshi, recorded almost $450 million in trading volume during the NFL playoffs”. These platforms are cash rich, perfectly positioned for the Superbowl audience and technologically expert - so if they are allowed to feature on the NFL ad roster, expect big name sports stars riding AI-powered rollercoasters around dollar-dripping, futuristic worlds.
Look out for the upcoming ad teasers so far includes: Pepsi Vs Coke (a cheeky inclusion of the Coke polar bear combining with a classic throw back to the brilliant pepsi challenge 80s campaign), Bud, Matthew McConaughey, Bradley Cooper, Lady Gaga, Ben Stiller, Emma Stone & The Duolingo Owl. Here is a great read of the super bowl economics by advertiser Ro
Apple Of The (Ads) Eye
I’m still looking forward to the Superbowl and the ads that surround it, but I’m fairly certain the most relevant ad foreshadowing the potential perils of the AI epoch will be this warning shot - fired exactly forty two years earlier in 1984.
Harry Lang → the CMO of a leading Blockchain and author of the 5 Star rated marketing guidebook ‘Brands, Bandwagons & Bullshit,’ available on Amazon. You can connect with Harry on LinkedIn
What’s your take? Vote below
Thanks for reading and have a great few days and see you Friday.
Danny & Harry