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Comment by minimaxir | Hacker News Reader

Which Super Bowl LX ads haven't backfired yet?

The Anthropic one? Although I'm sure they'll put ads into claude eventually

Early audience response suggested the message struggled to land. According to an iSpot survey of 500 viewers, the ad’s likeability score placed it in the bottom 3% compared with Super Bowl ads over the past five years. Its top-two-box purchase intent scored 24% below Super Bowl norms and 19% below ads in its category that aired over the last 90 days. Viewers most commonly described their reaction as “WTF,” signaling confusion around both the message and the execution.

https://www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/super-bowl-revealed-a...

I think that the ideas of AI boosters and other tech maximalists will pretty much always "struggle to land" with normal people. (See also: the ring ad.)

I think what mostly came across was "welcome to the next crypto bubble".

I don't think "normal people" especially run-of-the-mill office workers, like the idea of AI or want it to succeed. Not that it's going to stop Silicon Valley from ramming it down everyone's throats.

Only when the underlying product sucks. "Here's how the Torment Nexus is going to torment you - subscribe now!" is never going to be a popular message because it is actively making the world worse.

People aren't being luddites or not understanding innovation. They know perfectly well what is being sold, and they hate it.

Contrast it with the Dotcom bubble, where people mainly thought it wasn't for them or that they didn't need it. Look at interviews of people back then, and the services advertised are at worst described as "unnecessary": you would've had very little trouble convincing them that there would be some market for them.

But with those extreme AI examples? Normal people understand it, and they hate it.

The worst one I remember was "Gerbils" by outpost dots com , a Super Bowl ad with a gerbil cannon. But opinions differ on that one.

The Anthropic ads are heavily into the uncanny valley. The services they are demonstrating looks horrible - even before the ad.

A soulless psychiatrist who'll give you generic cookie-cutter advice about deeply personal issues? Why would you want that!?

Same with the personal trainer, the startup coach, and the professor. Any of them would be incredibly creepy in real life, with their fake smiling, uncanny repeated stock phrases, and fake positivity.

They are trying to spin it like the integrated ads are the problem, but the services are too far detached from genuine human behaviour for that to matter. "Our creepy ripoff psychiatrist doesn't have ads" isn't exactly a great message, is it?

Aside from the ads/no-ads, they're also trying to lampoon chatgpt (especially the "sycophantic" 4o style), since Claude is supposed to be a more "human" LLM (or at least Anthropic likes to think so given their focus on constitutional rlaif, "soul doc" and whatnot).

But it's not a good ad when the only people who will get the reference are those plugged into "ai twitter". But association by implication doesn't work, the only thing most people will end up associating is the creepy guy with "Claude"

> But it's not a good ad when the only people who will get the reference are those plugged into "ai twitter". But association by implication doesn't work, the only thing most people will end up associating is the creepy guy with "Claude"

It might also work for people who watch "South Park". I've never used any LLM speech interface, and until recently had only ever asked ChatGPT short one off questions and so had never seen the sycophantic tendencies, but immediately recognized the creepy people in the ads were supposed to represent ChatGPT from its portrayal in the South Park episode "Sickofancy" from August of last year.

For someone out of the loop, which ones have backfired, other than Ring/Flock?

pokemon?

A fail IMO because it exposed people as only liking Gen 1 Pokemon. Except that guy who liked Zygarde.

Yeah, but Jigglypuff singing put both offenses to sleep.

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