{"id":13265,"date":"2022-02-15T00:04:15","date_gmt":"2022-02-15T00:04:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mailinvest.blog\/index.php\/2022\/02\/15\/from-ftx-to-alexa-to-meta-super-bowl-ads-offered-a-vision-of-a-radical-future\/"},"modified":"2022-02-15T00:04:15","modified_gmt":"2022-02-15T00:04:15","slug":"from-ftx-to-alexa-to-meta-super-bowl-ads-offered-a-vision-of-a-radical-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mailinvest.blog\/index.php\/2022\/02\/15\/from-ftx-to-alexa-to-meta-super-bowl-ads-offered-a-vision-of-a-radical-future\/","title":{"rendered":"From FTX to Alexa to Meta, Super Bowl ads offered a vision of a radical future"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\u201cThere was probably more future-messaging at the Super Bowl this year than ever before,\u201d said Tim Nudd, editor in chief of the Clio Awards,<\/a> the ad-evaluation organization. \u201cAnd a real sense of FOMO (fear of missing out) driving a lot of it,\u201d he added, particularly of the cypto ads.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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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\u2019s more shiny and transformative than any it\u2019s portrayed in decades.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Or is it dark and transformative?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cIt was a bizarre night of Super Bowl ads full of near-future dystopian hellscapes,\u201d futurist Amy Webb<\/a> wrote in an email to The Washington Post. \u201cOnce-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,\u201d she added.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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She was referring, respectively, to Meta\u2019s Oculus Quest 2 ad in which<\/a> a beloved-but-neglected Chuck E. Cheese-type creation is revived in headset-land; a Scarlett Johansson-Colin Jost spot of Alexa-enabled awkwardness<\/a>; and an Uber Eats spot<\/a> in which a host of famous people confusingly down candles and bite into lightbulbs.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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While they might on one level be seen as frilly marketing \u2014 this is, after all, the venue that made Go Daddy famous<\/a> \u2014 Super Bowl ads offer indications of what tech companies and their Madison Avenue interlocutors want us to know about where we\u2019re headed. Many of the spots (the others noted came from Boston Dynamics\u2019 robots and FTX\u2019s crypto platform) injected lightness. The Boston Dynamics commercial, for instance, was a joint commercial with Sam Adams and jokingly showed<\/a> the robotics\u2019 company \u201cSpot\u201d downing beers with security guards in a way that played off the talking-animal Super Bowl convention.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The FTX one had Larry David as a curmudgeon time-jumping through history<\/a> to naysay inventions like the wheel, democracy and the Walkman along with cryptocurrency. (\u201cDon\u2019t Be Like Larry,\u201d FTX beseeched. \u201cDon\u2019t miss out. On crypto. On NFT\u2019s. On the Next Big Thing.\u201d) 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\u2019s heads. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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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<\/a> begins to deploy Spot at more widespread commercial<\/a> scale. And Alexa seemed designed to show how powerful the home technology could one day be \u2014 to insert in the consumer consciousness what it could potentially do, if not quite yet.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cIt\u2019s almost like they want to acculturate an acceptance of these technologies,\u201d said Rabindra Ratan, associate professor in the Department of Media and Information at Michigan State University.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Of the Boston Dynamics spot, he said, \u201cThey 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.\u201d In the Alexa case, Amazon\u2019s goal appeared to be to offer \u201cnot 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.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cFor 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 \u2026 that\u2019s a choice,\u201d wrote<\/a> the commentator Mike Schneider of Variety Magazine of the Alexa ad on Twitter.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But they may also be moving the goal posts in a way that\u2019s more subtle and \u2014 once you get past the immediate naysaying \u2014 fundamentally redefining how we think of technology.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cRemember when people would get creeped out by [Internet] sidebar ads that they didn\u2019t expect?\u201d Ratan said. \u201cThis 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\u2019s not quite as scary. Or at least I think that is what they are hoping for.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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He concluded of the latter ad. \u201cI was cracking up. But of course, in the back of my mind, I could not help but imagine those robots armed with guns.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The spots in some ways evoke \u201c1984,\u201d the mega-famous ad <\/a>of nearly four decades ago in which Steve Jobs marketed the Apple Macintosh as a democratizing and personalizing tool \u2014 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The spots also shared parallels to the E*trade talking-baby (itself making a return<\/a> Sunday), which when it first appeared<\/a> 13 years ago in a way cuddlefied the then-unsettling prospect of conducting stock trades online.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cThe 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,\u201d Nudd, the ad expert, said, noting it was why some of the other tech spots also played off 1990\u2019s touchstones like \u201cAustin Powers\u201d and \u201cThe Cable Guy,\u201d nostalgia as neutralizing force.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Not that this is simple to accomplish. \u201cWe want to feel like we\u2019re on a continuum and we\u2019re safe and the world doesn\u2019t change,\u201d Nudd said. \u201cBut how do you square that with being a company that\u2019s trying to change the world?\u201d He particularly noted the Meta commercial, which \u201cassumes a rosy vision of the future that people might not share.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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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\u2019s Law School \u201cseem to be just more hype, pretending these machines can do far more than what they actually do.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cBut apparently even this sort of hype helps sell things,\u201d he said. \u201cElon Musk has been playing this game for years.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The Anheuser-Busch spot<\/a> 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 \u201cNouns.\u201d As it happens, Bud Light recently teamed<\/a> with Nouns to create the Bud Light N3XT Collection \u2014 more than 12,000 NFTs done in the scheme of the brand it sold for $399 per token. That $399 \u2014 no decimal point \u2014 is part of a bid by the brand to cultivate a hipper image and attract younger drinkers.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The actor starred in an ad for the backoffice customer-service company Salesforce. With a similar \u201ceh\u201d as FTX\u2019s David, he shunned<\/a> all of this future stuff in favor of \u201cTeam Earth,\u201d Salesforce\u2019s sustainability initiative.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cSo while the others look to the metaverse and Mars, let\u2019s stay here and restore ours,\u201d the actor said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cThe most inspirational ad of the night from Salesforce and Matthew McConaughey who, dressed like an astronaut, literally brought us back down to Earth,\u201d Webb said. \u201cWhere do I get a Team Earth badge?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n