Super Bowl ad, in advertising lore, is the holy grail: the opportunity for a company to advertise to tens of millions of people at once. That’s a really best scenario. But during Sunday’s broadcast, tech companies spent $7 million worth of airtime highlight their most alarming characteristics.
Take Meta, formerly Facebook and alternative reality destination Questy’s. Coming from the minds of the people who made the ads behind MetaSuper Bowl commercials advertise its virtual reality headset, Questy’s as a space-themed venue full of games and singing cartoon creatures. (You know, beat Chuck E. Cheese vibes.) The commercial begins with Questy closing down, sending people who want Black crystal Additional to find new gigs. Finally, our hero, a mechanical dog with begging eyes, finds new hope after being rescued from a garbage compactor and sent to a cosmic center where — miraculously — someone puts a Quest 2 headset on the puppy, and he reunites with your majesty’s friend in the virtual world of Meta.
This moment is supposed to feel redeemed, or aspirational, or at least triumphant. But the dog’s arc reads more. Like so many bleak sci-fi stories, from Snow arrive Black mirror, the meat space has become hell, and the virtual world is the only place left to find pleasure. Usually that is presented as Bad Thing. However, Meta’s ad seems to say, “I mean, hey, things are going south, but Horizon Worlds is going to be fun – promise!” Yes, one way or another, Meta has been saying this for a while — constantly looking for ways to keep us online instead of interacting with human beings — but its Super Bowl game is exemplary image of speaking out the quiet part. It’s also a reminder that in this fantasy world where the metaverse saves us from our own dark abyss, not everyone can afford to drop $300 on a headset to do so. They can, like our animatronic friend, get stuck in reality right after someone tore a helmet.
Meta is not the only one. Coinbaseone of several crypto companies to buy Super Bowl airtimeran an ad that, for 60 seconds, just showed a brightly colored QR code running around the screen like the world’s slowest game about Pong. It led people to a Coinbase website offering $15 free bitcoin to new users. Bringing in new users is clearly what all crypto companies need to do right now — the first adopters are already in. But Security experts and even the FBI have warning about the dangers of random QR code scanning. Asking people to take that action perfectly fits this concept of Hey, why not do something with your finances that very few people fully understand?, the epitome of crypto risk. Va no multi-activity. Coinbase App popularity skyrocketed and finally crashed after Sunday’s advertisement. Meta Reply on Twitter with their own pop-up QR codes and the message “Hope this doesn’t break”, and if these companies weren’t two of the naughty guys playing while Rome burned, I’d take my hat off. (This should be easy as the hat will be irreplaceable and attached to my avatar in Horizon Worlds.)
Content
This content can also be viewed on the website derived are from.
Last but not least, let’s talk about Amazon’s Alexa advertising. It’s probably the “funniest” part of the bunch — featuring power couple Scarlett Johansson and Colin Jost and the amusing antics of their digital assistant Amazon — but it also feels the most real and has a real feel to it. perhaps the most worrisome. The premise is that the couple’s Alexa knows them so well, it can read their minds. While that’s pretty funny(?), the biggest fear most people have about always-on, always-listening devices like Alexa is that the system is collecting more personal information than they realize. or want. Amazon’s ad turns that extra piece of content into text with an ad showcasing their device posing a reminder to someone to play dead instead of watching his wife’s new show. Comedy!
This isn’t some extrapolation based on a sentence Mark Zuckerberg said in a press conference, or a fiery remark about the shape of a rocket by Jeff Bezos. It is a commentary on the actual content of these advertisements, the way these companies have carefully chosen to present themselves to the world. The problem with ad airtime is that once you pay for it, you can model the narrative any way you want (within the limits of Federal Trade Commission guidelines). These are the futures these entities have chosen to create; this is how their executives want their product to be seen.
To be fair, not every tech company’s Big Game ad is a waking nightmare. For example, Salesforce put Matthew McConaughey in a spacesuit and sent him off in a hot air balloon to remind everyone that while Zuckerberg and Elon Musk want us off this planet, we should stand firmer. . “While others look at the metaverse and Mars, let’s stay here and restore ours,” he said. Well, let’s fix the world’s problems! All we need is… Sales force… and… Wooderson? In fact, this is perhaps the bleakest of all. Maybe we’ll all be better follow Guy Fieri to Flavortown.
Content
This content can also be viewed on the website derived are from.
Stories with WIRED are more amazing
