In between the Seahawks demolishing the Patriots and Bad Bunny climbing a telephone pole in his dynamic and elaborate halftime show performance, tech companies got plenty of airtime on Super Bowl Sunday.
Some of AI’s biggest names touted their models and products in ads in Super Bowl LX, including Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, Meta and, of course, AI’s biggest rivalry: Anthropic and OpenAI. Viewers generally reacted badly to the AI ads, which scored very low for attention, likeability and watchability.
Here’s a rundown of what we caught:
- As shown last week, Anthropic decided to use two ad slots to malign the integration of ads in chatbots, including a clip where someone asks, “Can I get a six-pack quickly?” and, upon providing his height and weight, elicits an advertisement for insoles that “help short kings stand tall.”
- OpenAI, meanwhile, tailored one of its ads around Codex, the company’s coding agent. The ad’s tagline, “you can just build things,” included shots of people playing with circuit boards, installing Linux on an old computer and building robots. The other focused on ChatGPT, centering around a farmer using the chatbot to track crops.
Kate Rouch, CMO of OpenAI, fired back at Anthropic’s shots at its in-chat advertising decision, telling AdWeek, “The way that Anthropic’s ads are constructed is just not true to how ads will appear in the free ChatGPT. Free access to this technology is critical. Your ability to pay isn’t the thing that determines if you have access to AI or not.”
Notably absent from the game were ads from AI search platform Perplexity and Elon Musk-owned xAI. Musk, along with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, did earn shoutouts in the debut of AI.com, an AI agent platform founded by Crypto.com CEO Kris Marszalek after he purchased the domain name for $70 million, plainly stating in its 30-second slot that “AGI is coming.” Additionally, spirits brand Svedka unveiled its first primarily AI-generated ad, featuring dancing robots throwing around bottles of its vodka and spilling drinks throughout their circuitry.