Although some AI brand names may sound like rhythms or audible tones, this year’s Super Bowl AI ads have nothing to do with play calling.
This Sunday, the tech giant will tap into the mainstream audience of Super Bowl V to tout its new AI capabilities. Meanwhile, other non-tech brands plan to air ads created with generative AI in a bid to stand out.
Microsoft’s Super Bowl spot promotes Copilot, its flagship AI platform that powers a variety of features across a variety of apps, devices, and websites. In a new campaign that debuted this week, Microsoft aims to show how his Copilot can be an “AI companion” across Windows, Android, and Apple devices. But instead of bogging down soccer fans with AI jargon, Microsoft’s “Watch Me” commercial aims to encourage people to storyboard a movie, study chemistry, or write code for a new game. shows how his Copilot can help people in their daily lives.
In an interview with Digiday about the campaign, Kathleen Hall, Microsoft’s chief brand officer, said that AI-centered approaches to brand messaging were still in their infancy, such as in the early days of PCs and cloud computing. Based on Microsoft’s strategy for marketing the category.
“AI is not some ethereal giant housed somewhere,” Hall said. “What we have in front of us is the accumulation of important little things that add up to big things. It’s not just the big things you hear about, like curing cancer or saving the world.”
While many Super Bowl ads are aimed at laughs, Hall said he doesn’t think comedy won’t work for the First Officer campaign (at least for now), adding that the “empowering” tone chosen ” He added that the “height and emotional insight” “felt appropriate.” The Watch Me concept has also evolved from an initial plan last spring, months after the AI boom began, from being about Microsoft’s corporate positioning in the AI field to focusing more on what AI means to people. Changed.
“Microsoft’s advertising fulfills all the promises of AI, which means everyone will be able to create more, faster, and better than before,” said Mo Alibi, senior analyst at Forrester. It’s a thing,” he said. “I think this will give them a limited amount of time to deliver on their promises, unless the application of this technology is widely publicized or steadily improves the daily lives of users during 2024. , these brands are going to lose some credibility.”
High ad prices put Sunday’s Super Bowl out of reach for many AI marketers. His single ad for the 2024 Super Bowl costs him $7 million, about a fifth of what AI advertisers spent on him overall in Q3 2023. According to Media Radar, AI advertisers spent a total of $40.2 million in his first nine months of 2023. In 2023, of which he will spend $ 35 million in the third quarter alone.
AI for accessibility and cybersecurity
Microsoft isn’t the only tech giant using the Super Bowl to market AI. Google’s new ad for his Pixel 8 features the smartphone’s accessibility tools. Titled “Javier in Frame,” this commercial shows how the AI-powered guided frame feature can help people who are blind or have low vision take photos and videos. . The ad was shot and directed by blind filmmaker Adam More and narrated by Stevie Wonder, also a blind musician.
Other technology companies are also marketing their AI in various Super Bowl ads. In a Wild West-themed ad filled with robots, CrowdStrike showcases its AI capabilities for cybersecurity. Meanwhile, Etsy is making its debut in the big game to promote its recently released AI-enabled “Gift Mode” feature.
In a night filled with celebrities and humorous ads, some marketing experts believe the tone of Microsoft and Google’s AI ads will help them stand out. Charles Taylor, a marketing professor at Villanova School of Business, said companies often focus more on product awareness than brand building when marketing new categories. But with AI, products can span so many categories.
“Big marketers like Google and Microsoft are in a somewhat different category,” Taylor said. “So they overlap, but at the same time you can teach them about the product and build brand loyalty.”
Non-AI companies leveraging AI
Avocados from Mexico, a longtime Super Bowl sponsor, has chosen to focus on digital rather than running TV ads. The new “GuacAImole” platform uses AI from OpenAI to generate guacamole recipes and photos based on user-uploaded ingredient images. The website also has guardrails in place to keep recipes brand safe and USDA approved. If you upload an image of an inappropriate ingredient, you’ll receive a response saying the product is “undetermined.”
While the last Super Bowl explored AI capabilities, the brand’s digital approach for 2024 aims to keep the focus on the brand and leave technology behind the scenes. 270B, the Texas-based agency that built the website, also removed other brand names and images when training the tool. “Last year we thought about it at the last minute, but this year we wanted to do it first,” said 270B CEO Christian Bottini.
After 2022’s “Crypto Bowl”, AI is already creating trust
In some ways, AI-enabled advertising is reminiscent of another Super Bowl technology trend not too far away. It was the wave of crypto commercials in 2022 that led to the game being dubbed the “Crypto Bowl” before the subsequent Super Bowl slump. digital currency. However, marketing experts point out that there are many differences. For example, generative AI is already used in many applications and is not tied to speculative markets like cryptocurrencies.
“Cryptocurrencies have always contained some degree of radioactivity as unregistered securities, and large tech companies and multinationals have been slow to adopt them,” Forrester’s Alibi said. “Generative AI is at the other end of the spectrum, with big tech companies and multinationals betting big on their AI-driven future and now having to build the same level of enthusiasm in consumers.” I am facing it.”
Are AI companies repeating the crypto marketing mistakes of over-promising and under-delivering? Not intentionally, maybe unconsciously. But Hall said Microsoft asked the same question it always does: “Why does the average person care?”
“I think that’s where cryptocurrencies have been missing,” she said. “I don’t think we looked at it and compared ourselves to it and thought, ‘Let’s do better.’ We just executed our normal strategy based on meaningful truths. ”
