ChatGPT

Super Bowl 59 Grins and Groans

Nader Ashway3 Comments

Super Bowl 59 is in the books, and congratulations to the Philadelphia Eagles on an outstanding performance. If you were in the mood for a dominating defensive performance, you had a very good evening. If you were in the mood for great advertising, well…you certainly got a LOT of ads, but not sure if they were all great. Some high points, some low points, and some decidedly weird points. Let’s break it down.

Themes
Like last year, a lot of advertisers turned to the meta approach for their spots. This is when the ad is about making the ad. Dunkin, Homes.com and UberEats all took this approach, and it can be really funny (like the way Homes.com doubled down on the “it’s the best” meme with Morgan Freeman,) or it can get a little obtuse, like the Dunkin’ ad with actor Jeremy Strong trying to get into character by immersing himself in a barrel of coffee beans. (Right?)

Facial hair was another theme in this year’s ads. (There’s a sentence I never thought I’d write.) Both Pringles and Little Caesars decided that their best angle would be to have men’s facial hair – eyebrows and mustaches – fly off for some odd reason. Some of the gags were humorous (the caterpillars chanting “we’re not worthy” to Eugene Levy’s eyebrows made me chuckle,) and I think Pringles did it with a bit more context. After all, there’s a giant mustache on every package.

A surprising few amount of spots this year from car manufacturers. Polestar showed up in the pregame show, but not as an official Super Bowl commercial. Only Jeep and Ram appeared this year, which is odd, given the history of this game and some of the iconic spots that have run. If you’re counting, we had more spots with Matthew McConaughey than with cars.

HONORABLE MENTIONS:
A few ads played it safe, and still managed to deliver decent brand messages. Orlando Bloom and Drew Barrymore did a cute tete-a-tete on European vs American holiday/vacation expressions, and it painted MSC Cruises in a similarly cute light. Homes.com played at the idea of saying they’re “the best” while their legal counsel advised them that they can’t legally say that. Uber Eats continued their “the NFL is trying to sell you food” conspiracy theory with origin stories, and it gets especially funny when Martha Stewart laughs hysterically that the Super Bowl venue is “named after a salad!”

The last couple of years, Jesus has made an appearance at the Super Bowl, but this year’s was a bit more special because he brought along a better soundtrack. Note to aspiring creative directors: having Johnny Cash sing Depeche Mode in your spot is ALWAYS a good idea. Hat tip to Jesus’ creative team. Hailee Steinfeld and Wanda Sykes teamed up for a smart PSA that made me look, er, notice, er, appreciate their, I mean ITS, value. It’s for Novartis, and it’s aimed at getting more women screened for breast cancer. And Dove scores another hit with a female empowerment spot that was punctuated by the line “let’s change the way we talk to our girls.” Nice.

While we’re mentioning some ads, we have to talk about Seal playing a, well, seal in the Mountain Dew spot. If facial hair flying off faces, and tongues flying out of mouths (more on that in a moment,) wasn’t weird enough, a seal with the face of Seal, singing a jingle to the tune of “Kiss From a Rose” was basically a 12 on the weird-o-meter. Fun? Sure. But about 50 million Americans probably had a terrifying dream about that one last night.

GRINS
First off, golf claps to Weather Tech for finally listening to their agency and doing a concept spot instead of their usual “here’s a view of our factory where we prove they’re made in America” pandering. The grannies-go-wild approach offered lots of good laughs, and then quietly made a nice plug for their spill-proof floor mats. Much more memorable than the last few years.

Google Pixel 9 really tugged at the heartstrings with their dad-and-daughter vignette disguised as a “guy turns to Gemini AI for help preparing for his job interview.” The reason this worked so well is that it contextualized the product benefits while letting us in on the backstory. Really well-conceived, and really well-produced. You almost never want to go soft-sell on Super Bowl, but Google almost always has, and almost always wins.

Liquid Death literally made me LOL with its “drinking on the job” spot. Pilots, surgeons, school bus drivers, even the cops are pounding Liquid Death, and to an awesome theme song. The company has disguised their filtered water to look like small-batch beer cans, and this is exactly why: so they can misdirect and manipulate you right into the big reveal. Good stuff. Spots end with bold type: “Don’t be scared. It’s just water.”

It just isn’t Super Bowl without a Budweiser Clydesdale spot, and this one, “a horse walks into a bar,” is by far one of their best ever. It’s great storytelling, with virtually no dialogue. Our hero is faced with a choice, has to overcome difficult challenges along the way, and somehow, some way, prevails. For decades, Budweiser hasn’t even tried to sell beer with their Super Bowl commercials…they sell this version of Americana on which we can (almost) all agree.

Hellmann’s went retro with their “When Harry Met Sally” sendup. It features Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan back in Katz’s Deli, and wouldn’t you know it? Meg has another orgasmic experience (this time it’s REAL!) thanks to a shmear of Hellmann’s mayonnaise. Targeted at Gen X? You bet. Wrapped in a bow for Gen Z? Sure, and that’s why you have Sydney Sweeney deliver the punchline. So much better than their last several years of Super Bowl spots, which were big groans for me. Oh, and Hellmann’s signs off with the apt line “It hits the spot.”

Doritos proves that when you crowdsource your advertising (through their thankfully resurrected “Crash the Super Bowl” campaign,) really good things can happen. Here, an alien ship comes to Earth and tries to take a guy’s Doritos away. He fights them off – sort of – and then, by chance, the Doritos destroy the alien ship! The alien survives, and he/she/it (?) and the guy enjoy the chips together. What’s great about Doritos is that they ALWAYS put the brand front and center, and the motivation is consistent: get your hands on some Doritos.

I think my favorite of the night (and this is a bit of a critic’s pick, I’ll admit) was the ChatGPT “dots” ad. Again, no voiceover, just graphics, and magnificent ones at that. All of it based off ChatGPT’s “dot” prompt. So it’s a little “hello world,” and a little “IYKYK.” Anyone who has used ChatGPT will recognize the dot. During the spot, the dots sync up to go and create all kinds of interesting images, symbolizing progress through time, from fire to the wheel to the steam ship, to walking on the moon, to dial up modems to now. And then it delivers the line “all progress has a starting point.” I like this most of all. It says “AI is not the be-all and end-all. We’re just getting going, and let’s see where we might go from here.” A bit of a departure for Super Bowl advertising, but a simple and clear way to illustrate the power and potential of this particular AI engine.

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GROANS

RED BULL: When I saw this spot come on, I immediately recognized the illustration style, and the classic setup. Boy penguin says to his father “I figured out how to fly!” Dad, suspicious, says “oh…really? And how exactly are we going to do that?” The boy responds that all they have to do is drink Red Bull, and they’ll be able to fly because, after all, Red Bull gives you wiiiiings. Up to this moment, this is a typical Red Bull spot. But then, the boy can’t fly, because the Red Bull he attempts to drink is frozen. (They’re penguins and it’s 40 below zero, according to Dad.) So…the product doesn’t work. The benefit is never realized. And we’re all disappointed. They try to make us think they’re in on the joke, because the voiceover says Red Bull gives you wings, “but only if you drink it.” No. No. No. Don’t do that.

SQUARESPACE: Look, I get that it’s hard to sell tech enablement as a Super Bowl spot. Squarespace is a platform that helps do-it-yourself-ers build and maintain their own websites. Last year, they tried aliens…with Martin Scorsese directing and starring in the spot. The year before that, it was an obtuse take on “the singularity” with Adam Driver. In 2022, they actually made a really GOOD spot with Zendaya, who portrayed Sally, who sold (you guessed it,) seashells by the seashore. That spot followed a simple narrative. Sally was not doing well. Then, she built a website with Squarespace, and things really took off! That’s generally how we like to portray our brands in our advertising: as aids in the hero’s cause.

This year, however, we have actor Barry Keoghan (the guy who went full frontal in Saltburn,) riding a mule through the Irish countryside, whipping laptops at people like a sedated and psychotic newspaper delivery boy. But they’re laptops! And they’re dangerous! And one smashes through the window of a pub. (Also, and even stranger, hardly anyone reacts to any of these near-death assaults.) And how, exactly, does this connect me to any understanding of their basic offering? Most Americans could hardly make out the brogue, let alone the value proposition.  

COFFEE MATE: So, let’s give props to Coffee Mate for shelling out the almost $8 million dollars and producing their first-ever Super Bowl ad! (Applause.) Aaaaand…let’s give it up for Shania Twain writing and producing a new song specifically for the commercial. Yay.

However, that song starts with the lyric “let’s go tongues.” And the young man in the ad, who has just had a taste of cold foam after adding it to his cold brew coffee (I guess?) goes into a trance, where his tongue (yes, you heard me right,) does various dances, makes heart shapes, plays the chimes, high-tongues (I just wrote that) the Coffee Mate logo, and then – are you sitting down? Jumps out of his mouth. And spins around in the air while fireworks go off, and then plunges back into the young man’s mouth as he awakes from this fantasy. Just as a reminder, we’re talking about his TONGUE!

Then the young man and his pal start chugging (question mark) the Coffee Mate foam together, as we cut to the closing shot of the line “a little foam a lotta fun” spelled out in, you guessed it, foam! I could have lived a very full life without having seen that. And hopefully, I never will again.

So…what were your favorites? Let me know in the comments.

Here’s mud in your A.I.

Nader AshwayLeave a comment

If you’ve been paying attention to the industry news, there’s been a LOT of chatter about AI, (artificial intelligence,) and its various applications. And some of them are really intriguing and useful. With the ability to run predictive diagnostics, artificial intelligence (better described as data-driven machine learning,) is ideal for applications that can benefit from robust and speedy automation.

As is our way, it doesn’t take long for something useful and intriguing to be repurposed into something base and silly. Case in point: AI is also being used now for some fairly sophisticated parlour tricks, like recreating the Mona Lisa.

(Moves soapbox to the foreground.)

But the application of AI in marketing, and most specifically in the creative process, is really (in this sentient blogger’s opinion,) an overreach.

There’s no data set for creativity. In fact, there are no rules. What makes something “creative” is that it is indeed CREATED. By a human being. Part of why we buy paintings, and music and novels and sculpture is because we know there’s a backstory of someone who sweat it out in a studio or at the typewriter. Someone whose fingers bled. Someone who made mistakes, and tried variations, and threw whole passages in a trash can. We celebrate that humanity and that pain and the entire process when we consume anything creative. Not just the end result.

The same is true in marketing. Writing anything – an ad, a blog post, a commercial script – is hard. It’s taking business rules and mandatories into consideration and asking a creative person to then do intellectual gymnastics, linking sometimes disparate ideas in unexpected ways, without a net. Can you write an algorithm for that? Sure, but the results are likely to be shit – the kind of shit a hack would conjure.

For instance, you’ve probably seen these kinds of promotions for having AI write your next blog post.

What’s really happening there? I don’t claim to have knowledge of any of their algorithms, but I’d bet my last dollar that these are search bots that crawl the web for every piece of content written in the last 10 years about a particular subject. They ingest this huge data set, pick out bits and pieces using sorting criteria that prioritize those with the most clicks, comments and instances, and then rearrange and reconstruct a new version for you.

That’s not creating. That’s recreating at best. And theft at worst.

ChatGPT, the latest and supposedly greatest iteration of AI language prowess, has added a sexy wrinkle into their algorithm. Instead of just swiping content and repurposing it, it adds a level of dialogue formatting to make it sound more conversational, and thus more natural and believable. It claims to “answer follow-up questions” and “admits its mistakes.” And given that it is machine-based learning, it gets “better” the more often it’s used. (It’s driving educators crazy, as students who use it can be deemed to be cheating, not researching.)

What a paradox: a machine learning model that improves the more often it’s used, but also degrades the craft proportionately in the process. [Some disclosures: OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT is funded in part by Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and just got a billion dollar injection of capital from Microsoft.]

In a recent viral kerfuffle on social media, recording artist Nick Cave (throaty lead singer with The Bad Seeds) reacted to a song that was “written” by ChatGPT “in the style of Nick Cave.” He could not have put it any better:

“Songs arise out of suffering, by which I mean they are predicated upon the complex, internal human struggle of creation and, well, as far as I know, algorithms don’t feel. Data doesn’t suffer. ChatGPT has no inner being, it has been nowhere, it has endured nothing, it has not had the audacity to reach beyond its limitations, and hence it doesn’t have the capacity for a shared transcendent experience, as it has no limitations from which to transcend. ChatGPT’s melancholy role is that it is destined to imitate and can never have an authentic human experience, no matter how devalued and inconsequential the human experience may in time become.”

Okay, back to marketing, and particularly the art of writing good advertising. Part of the craft is developing a sense of counterintuitive thought and embracing lateral thinking. Another big part is the symbiotic relationship of the headline and the image. But so much of modern advertising is about contextualizing the brand into the cultural moment from which it arises.

Think of how many great headlines and taglines would never – could never – be written by AI, by virtue of this necessity for divergence and a sense of the cultural periphery.

“Think Small” from DDB was a radical notion at the dawn of the 1960s. As Americans – less than two decades removed from World War II – were upwardly mobile, one of the most pervasive (and comical) trends in automobile-dom was an oblique obsession with size. Bigger was better, and American cars looked like ocean liners. The nation was also wildly nationalistic at the time, and DDB’s assignment was to sell a small, quirky German car to this audience.

To get to the heart of these cultural undertones and suggest an opposite notion was a radical idea. And paired with the spare art direction (bless you Helmut Krone) and that sea of white space, it became a touchstone for our industry. Could AI ever reach that level of insight? Of rebelliousness? Of sheer chutzpah?

“Think Different.” When this campaign (from TBWA/Chiat/Day) was released in the 1990s, it was paired with images of pioneering artists, thinkers and doers, like Einstein, Picasso and Miles Davis. It also featured zero body copy. What’s so interesting about the head/tagline is that it’s not even good English. But it was a fine encapsulation of the Apple brand in that moment and what it stood for. Would AI dare to break grammar rules to create an emotional response?

I suppose it’s mildly ironic, or at least cheeky, that I chose two classic advertising examples that use the word “think” in the headlines. And perhaps that’s exactly what I’m driving at, and what Nick Cave was fuming at.

Maybe I’m an old fart, but I prefer the consternation. The suffering. The pacing and the waiting and the wondering if this “idea” has legs. Give me time to think about what’s going on in the world. Give me the sudden burst of insight when the neurons start to fire. Give me the end of the sentence that starts with “wouldn’t it be cool if…” Give me a person, thinking about another person, and getting them to actually think different.

There’s nothing artificial about that.