“There was probably more future-messaging at the Super Bowl this year than ever before,” said Tim Nudd, editor in chief of the Clio Awards, the ad-evaluation organization. “And a real sense of FOMO (fear of missing out) driving a lot of it,” he added, particularly of the cypto ads.
Normally a redoubt of soft drinks and car brands, the Super Bowl-ad landscape this year offered a look at what might be called the coming web3 era, peddling to mainstream America, during the moment it most pays attention, a vision of the future that’s more shiny and transformative than any it’s portrayed in decades.
Or is it dark and transformative?
“It was a bizarre night of Super Bowl ads full of near-future dystopian hellscapes,” futurist Amy Webb wrote in an email to The Washington Post. “Once-cherished animatronic dogs had to find compassion in the metaverse. Alexa performed the ultimate invasion of privacy by reading minds. One-hour delivery services rendered humans so helpless they forgot how and what to eat,” she added.
She was referring, respectively, to Meta’s Oculus Quest 2 ad in which a beloved-but-neglected Chuck E. Cheese-type creation is revived in headset-land; a Scarlett Johansson-Colin Jost spot of Alexa-enabled awkwardness; and an Uber Eats spot in which a host of famous people confusingly down candles and bite into lightbulbs.
While they might on one level be seen as frilly marketing — this is, after all, the venue that made Go Daddy famous — Super Bowl ads offer indications of what tech companies and their Madison Avenue interlocutors want us to know about where we’re headed. Many of the spots (the others noted came from Boston Dynamics’ robots and FTX’s crypto platform) injected lightness. The Boston Dynamics commercial, for instance, was a joint commercial with Sam Adams and jokingly showed the robotics’ company “Spot” downing beers with security guards in a way that played off the talking-animal Super Bowl convention.
The FTX one had Larry David as a curmudgeon time-jumping through history to naysay inventions like the wheel, democracy and the Walkman along with cryptocurrency. (“Don’t Be Like Larry,” FTX beseeched. “Don’t miss out. On crypto. On NFT’s. On the Next Big Thing.”) And the Amazon Alexa spot had Johansson and Jost in a series of cringy situations as the speaker voiced the embarrassing thoughts in the couple’s heads. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
Yet for all their jokiness, an undercurrent of sincere ambition ran beneath them. The Boston Dynamics ad featured a cameo from company founder Marc Raibert and was meant to spotlight what robots can do as newish owner Hyundai begins to deploy Spot at more widespread commercial scale. And Alexa seemed designed to show how powerful the home technology could one day be — to insert in the consumer consciousness what it could potentially do, if not quite yet.
“It’s almost like they want to acculturate an acceptance of these technologies,” said Rabindra Ratan, associate professor in the Department of Media and Information at Michigan State University.
Of the Boston Dynamics spot, he said, “They are trying to illustrate the diversity of tasks that the robots can help facilitate while also trying to normalize the interaction between humans and this technology.” In the Alexa case, Amazon’s goal appeared to be to offer “not only a humorous celebration of the strength of their AI, but also a nod toward the increasing integration of predictive algorithms in our daily lives.”
On the one hand, the backlash to some of the ads suggest the companies are in fact pushing people beyond what people want or are ready for.
“For a product that we suspect is listening in and spying on us, to run a Super Bowl ad in which said product is shown indeed listening in and spying on us … that’s a choice,” wrote the commentator Mike Schneider of Variety Magazine of the Alexa ad on Twitter.
But they may also be moving the goal posts in a way that’s more subtle and — once you get past the immediate naysaying — fundamentally redefining how we think of technology.
“Remember when people would get creeped out by [Internet] sidebar ads that they didn’t expect?” Ratan said. “This is a whole new level, but when you put Scarlett Johansson and some clever self-deprecating jokes on the cover page or use a party-guy trope to normalize the interaction between humans and robots, it’s not quite as scary. Or at least I think that is what they are hoping for.”
He concluded of the latter ad. “I was cracking up. But of course, in the back of my mind, I could not help but imagine those robots armed with guns.”
The spots in some ways evoke “1984,” the mega-famous ad of nearly four decades ago in which Steve Jobs marketed the Apple Macintosh as a democratizing and personalizing tool — an ad that would go on to set the cultural table for a consumer embrace of technology that continues with personal devices like the iPhone and non-Apple products today.
The spots also shared parallels to the E*trade talking-baby (itself making a return Sunday), which when it first appeared 13 years ago in a way cuddlefied the then-unsettling prospect of conducting stock trades online.
“The future feels scary and unknown, and a lot of what these ads are saying is that you can feel safe coming along for this ride,” Nudd, the ad expert, said, noting it was why some of the other tech spots also played off 1990’s touchstones like “Austin Powers” and “The Cable Guy,” nostalgia as neutralizing force.
Not that this is simple to accomplish. “We want to feel like we’re on a continuum and we’re safe and the world doesn’t change,” Nudd said. “But how do you square that with being a company that’s trying to change the world?” He particularly noted the Meta commercial, which “assumes a rosy vision of the future that people might not share.”
One need not sink into the metaverse to feel a tech-enabled anxiety; amid a potential surveillance future also lies the grimness of a consumerist present. Many of the ads, said James Bessen, executive director of the Technology & Policy Research Initiative at Boston University’s Law School “seem to be just more hype, pretending these machines can do far more than what they actually do.
“But apparently even this sort of hype helps sell things,” he said. “Elon Musk has been playing this game for years.”
Many were seeking the free investment money offered by the platform, but it remained to be seen how users would feel if their investments depreciated, as many cryptocurrencies have in recent months.
The idea of a future in which many of us spend our days tooling around the metaverse using crypto to buy NFTs was on display with, of all things, a Bud Light Next ad, which contained layers of subtext beneath the fizz.
The Anheuser-Busch spot for the zero-carb beer included, via a distinct pair of glasses shown in museum artwork, a nod to a type of NFTs known as “Nouns.” As it happens, Bud Light recently teamed with Nouns to create the Bud Light N3XT Collection — more than 12,000 NFTs done in the scheme of the brand it sold for $399 per token. That $399 — no decimal point — is part of a bid by the brand to cultivate a hipper image and attract younger drinkers.
It might also, however, court some ill feeling. The value of NFTs famously fluctuate, and the reaction could be intense if the $400 Bud Light tokens go as low as the carb count.
All of this future talk has given even futurist minds an uneasy feeling. As we were encouraged not to be like Larry, they asked if it made more sense to be like McConaughey.
The actor starred in an ad for the backoffice customer-service company Salesforce. With a similar “eh” as FTX’s David, he shunned all of this future stuff in favor of “Team Earth,” Salesforce’s sustainability initiative.
“So while the others look to the metaverse and Mars, let’s stay here and restore ours,” the actor said.
“The most inspirational ad of the night from Salesforce and Matthew McConaughey who, dressed like an astronaut, literally brought us back down to Earth,” Webb said. “Where do I get a Team Earth badge?”
