Super Bowl 60 sells the future one ad at a time
The biggest television event of the year ran its sixty-first edition on 8 February, and the game was a classic; the commercials were the more interesting broadcast. A third of the ad slots were bought by AI companies, and the industry’s pitch to the American public has reached a new level of confidence.
The sixty-first Super Bowl was played on 8 February, and the game itself was the kind that the sport’s marketing department dreams of: a late lead change, a drive that consumed the final minutes, and a result that gave both cities something to argue about. The commercials were the more interesting broadcast. For the first time in the history of the event, more than a third of the ad slots were bought by companies whose entire business is artificial intelligence, and the industry’s annual pitch to the American public has reached a new level of confidence.
The AI advertising this year has a recognizable shape, and the shape says something about the industry’s self-image. The spots were expensive, thirty-second productions with celebrity voiceovers and slow-motion footage of hands doing work while a voice described the ‘new way of working’. Very few of them showed a product; several did not show a screen at all. The message being sold is not a technology but a posture, the promise that the audience’s job, their business, their creative work, will be transformed by something that requires no explanation because it is everywhere already. That is the advertising strategy of a category that has passed from novelty to assumption.
The economics behind the ad slots are worth a closer look. A thirty-second spot at this year’s event cost north of eight million dollars, and the companies that bought them are, with one or two exceptions, not yet profitable. The spending is a bet that the public’s tolerance for AI, which polls show is high and sceptical at the same time, can be converted into durable revenue, and the Super Bowl is where that bet is made because it is where the audience is most captive and least distracted. The marketing departments are spending the money that the product divisions have not yet earned, and the mismatch is the most honest measure of where the industry’s confidence actually lives.
I found myself watching the AI commercials with a mixture of amusement and recognition. The genre has perfected its form: the earnest voice, the abstract imagery, the tagline that promises liberation from drudgery. What none of the spots address is the part of the AI story that the industry is least comfortable telling, which is that the same models that liberate the work also reorganise the work, that every ‘new way of working’ is also a new way of not working, and that the transformation being advertised at eight million dollars a minute will land differently on the people whose jobs the spot is implicitly describing. The advertising is confident; the confidence is the product; and the product, for the moment, is selling.
The ad spend tells the truth about the industry’s next phase even when the ads themselves do not. The AI companies have stopped selling capability to the people who build, and started selling transformation to the people who buy, and that is the shift that every technology industry makes when it moves from the enthusiasts to the mainstream. The Super Bowl is the mainstream, and the mainstream has now been told, in the most expensive language available, that the future is already here and requires no explanation. The next few quarters will show whether the future can invoice.