About that AI Bowl: Reception of AI ads ‘sharply negative’ as brand beefs, misinformation brewed

If you watched the 2022 Crypto Bowl or the 2000 Dot Com Bowl, you might be used to ads from one sector dominating Super Bowl commercial breaks.

During Sunday night’s lackluster game, it became increasingly clear that this year would be known as the AI Bowl. Fifteen of the 66 commercials aired were either for AI companies or were made with AI, according to iSpot.

The spots ran the messaging gamut. Some addressed fears of an AI takeover, with Amazon’s spot for Alexa+ depicting Chris Hemsworth imagining his imminent doom at Alexa’s behest. Others pitched AI as a tool to do things you couldn’t before (OpenAI, Google Gemini, Ring, Meta and Oakley) or a way to relieve users of their workload (Microsoft Copilot, Genspark, Wix, Base44). Others addressed what’s to come for the future of AI, be it advertising (Anthropic) or agentic AI (AI.com).

The glut of ads and the messaging variety indicated to some experts the challenges the AI industry faces, including a growing pressure to stand out in an increasingly crowded market.

“It becomes a classic marketing problem of differentiation,” Derek Rucker, a professor of marketing at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, told Marketing Brew. “‘Which product do I use and why?’ I think it’s natural to see these AI firms move to the Super Bowl.”

Beyond that, AI companies are tasked with delivering tangible business results, not just hype. “Those companies are on the end of their growth curve,” Allen Adamson, co-founder of brand consultancy Metaforce, told Marketing Brew. “They need to generate revenue. Everyone understands that AI has a lot of potential, but now it’s time to see, [to] start seeing what that potential is beyond company evaluation and investor valuation levels.”

Data dump

What were consumers’ thoughts on the messages AI companies brought to the Big Game? The overall reception was “sharply negative,” according to a Meltwater analysis, which found that nearly 50% of mentions were negative and “far more critical than the broader ad sentiment during the event.”

Meltwater additionally found that discussions sometimes framed AI ads as being “emblematic of declining creative effort,” indicating the AI backlash among some consumers is continuing. That said, Meltwater found that the conversation about AI Super Bowl ads made up just 6% of total ad mentions and 4% of total ad engagement, meaning the ads weren’t necessarily talked about all that much.

AI brands in the game faced a unique challenge this year as they looked to stand out with consumers who were perhaps not primed for the volume of messages, Rucker said. “When you start seeing more [ads for that category], that fatigue that consumers are reporting—‘Do we have to see another one?’—what they’re saying is, ‘I’ve got enough information about that category; I really don’t want more,’” he said. “That’s usually a loss for the number of players in the category.”

Versus for a new generation

Sometimes, though, it’s fun to watch a new brand beef play out, like Coke and Pepsi’s ongoing feud, which Pepsi revived for its own Super Bowl spot, which depicts a polar bear taking the Pepsi Challenge—and choosing Pepsi, of course. And on Sunday, viewers were treated to AI brand mudslinging, as Anthropic debuted a new campaign for its platform Claude, with four spots from Mother skewering advertising on AI platforms in a not-so-subtle dig at OpenAI, which is presently testing ads on ChatGPT.

The copy of the initially released ad reads, “Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude,” and in a second spot, the copy reads, “There is a time and place for ads. Your conversations with AI should not be one of them.” That change was as intended, providing a build-on effect between the ads.

OpenAI execs were quick to reply to Anthropic’s spots, and OpenAI CMO Kate Rouch told us that while the spots were “effective” and “funny,” they were “untrue.”

The conversation generated from the back-and-forth may have helped Anthropic’s Claude get more attention, according to social data. There were more than 151,000 ChatGPT mentions and over 69,000 Claude mentions on X, per PeakMetrics, which found that “Claude’s campaign penetrated two times deeper relative to brand size.” As for sentiment, it was roughly 15% positive and 3.5% negative for both brands.

That said, PeakMetrics found that Anthropic’s approach may not have resonated as widely as OpenAI’s, which it suggested could be due to Anthropic’s spot requiring knowledge of OpenAI’s plans to integrate advertising, while OpenAI leaned on a message of inspiration.

“The origin of the work wasn’t about advertising, it was about what people want from this technology,” Andrew Stirk, head of brand marketing at Anthropic, wrote in a post on LinkedIn in an explanation of the brand’s message.

What’s this about?

The OpenAI-Anthropic spat wasn’t the only AI ad drama of the night. Ahead of the game, speculation that OpenAI had switched up its Super Bowl spot circulated online, complete with a fake Ad Age headline that the publication debunked.

Meanwhile, a video of actor Alexander Skarsgård using earbuds and some kind of shiny orb circulated, along with rumors that it was the originally intended Super Bowl ad promoting an AI hardware device. It was found to be a hoax, which OpenAI confirmed to Marketing Brew.

However, it’s unclear what entity made the video—and in an email, brand strategist Julia Delaney, who cc’d a press representative for Skarsgård, told Marketing Brew that the footage is real and of the actor, sharing a behind-the-scenes video. Delaney declined to share other details, citing a nondisclosure agreement. Lindsay McCallum Rémy, a spokesperson for Open AI, told Marketing Brew that the video had no connection to the company.

Guess we’ll just have to wait and see what Skarsgård is up to—and if an AI company is, indeed, behind it.