AI will certainly be featured in Super Bowl LVIII ads. But for the most part, technology’s role is played out behind the scenes.
For over a year now, artificial intelligence – and particularly generative AI – has dominated the discourse within the advertising industry. At agencies and brands alike, marketers have looked for new ways to apply AI throughout the creative process without running into some of the ethical and legal challenges raised by the technology; it has been, to say the least, a delicate dance.
How likely is it that AI will play a prominent role in advertising during Sunday’s Super Bowl? Given that virtually every marketer has been able to talk about it since ChatGPT arrived in November 2022, can we expect AI to be a central theme during some Game Day commercials, whether in the form of AI. are the companies themselves running ads or is generative AI used to create certain elements of other brands’ ads? The Super Bowl is, after all, one of the most important events of the year for marketers in the United States, with brands vying to present themselves as the most memorable, most creative and most innovative. Could AI be to Super Bowl LVIII what cryptocurrency was to Super Bowl LVII?
The short answer, according to many marketing experts, is: yes, AI will likely play an outsized role in in-game advertising this year — but it won’t be directly in the spotlight as much as one might expect. .
On the one hand, AI-based products will be directly promoted in a few places during Super Bowl LVIII.
Google has launched a Super Bowl ad centered around an AI-powered feature for the Pixel 8 smartphone called Guided Frame. The 60-second ad features a visually impaired man going about his daily life, courting a lover and eventually becoming a father. The story is told largely through the (much clearer) view of its Pixel 8, which uses Guided Frame to identify faces and tell the human when the subjects of its photo are captured by the camera. The ad features a short voiceover from Stevie Wonder.
Microsoft, whose recent investments in OpenAI helped it briefly supplant Apple as the world’s most valuable company last month, also unveiled an AI-focused Super Bowl ad. Titled “Watch Me,” the 60-second spot showcases some practical applications of Copilot – the brand’s AI-based software recently rolled out to its Office suite of platforms – which enables a group of creative professionals to overcome obstacles and to get closer to their goal. dreams. Using Copilot’s chat interface, for example, one of the characters in the spot asks the system to write code for an open-world 3D video game, which it quickly undertakes (no pun intended). .
The only non-tech brand that appears to be incorporating AI into its Super Bowl marketing efforts this year is sports drink brand Bodyarmor, which launched a regional Super Bowl ad incorporating unsettling and seemingly entirely AI-generated visuals. ‘AI, as well as an AI-generated message. scenario.
This part of the ad – which Bodyarmor included to poke fun at the very notion of artificiality – resembles some sort of fever dream: we see a sweaty, dead-eyed footballer whose head has fused with a drink bottle for athletes, another who rides a sort of roller coaster halfway through with a screaming hybrid of an Orca whale shark and a hammerhead shark, and a third – with a mouth for eyes – who stands victoriously in front of a large cake and holds a molded trophy in the shape of a pig’s head. This makes absolutely no sense, and that’s the problem. The ad then shifts from the AI-generated nightmare to the flesh-and-blood athletes: “Bodyarmor knows that nothing in sport should be artificial,” says a (human) narrator.
However, for the most part, AI’s role in this Sunday’s ads will likely take place behind the proverbial curtain.
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According to Jay Pattisall, principal analyst at Forrester, AI has likely been applied in a more subtle way in the creative process behind some of the ads that will air during Sunday’s game: “Super Bowl viewers will witness ads generated by ‘AI during the match – they just won. I don’t know,” he said. “It is likely that AI will be used in the production process in the form of virtual renderings of products or sets using 3D processors or game engines… But the technology is not ready for the Big Game when it comes to conceptualizing the advertising idea.”
In other words, humans continue – at least for now – to do most of the creative work, while AI is limited to small digital tweaks.
While generative AI is unlikely to have an outsized presence during gaming marketing this year, other experts echo Pattisall’s view that it could have been used in other, less direct ways. For example, ChatGPT – while probably not used by any major agency to concoct an entire Super Bowl ad idea – could have been used to come up with creative tips, which could then be taken and developed by humans. traders. “We won’t see ads created by Generation AI fighting for the top spot (during the Super Bowl),” says Bas Korsten, global director of creative and innovation at VML, but “maybe a few Pioneers will have used Generation AI tools to inspire their work – which is exactly what it should be used to do to enhance human creativity, not replace it.
In addition to being used (directly and indirectly) to inform the creative process, some brands and agencies are also likely to leverage AI during this year’s Super Bowl for what Matthew Dunn, senior vice president of strategy and innovation from Havas Media Network, calls “insights generation”: that is, analyzing large quantities of audience data collected during and after the game to glean new insights into the effectiveness of a campaign, which can in turn inform future strategies. “Marketers must consider many variables to determine how, when and where they can best reach their audiences to create a meaningful media experience, especially in an era when many brands are clamoring for attention,” explains Dunn. “AI can help marketers sift through data and find the moments and messages that matter to their audience.”
Aside from the Bodyarmor ad – which, after all, mocks the currently limited capabilities of AI-generated video – many brands that might have been tempted to use generative AI in their Super Bowl marketing programs would have could think twice about it after considering the charged legal waters in which technology is currently involved.
Dozens of authors, actors and other artists have taken action – some in the form of legal action – against what they see as non-consensual use of their intellectual property in training generative AI models, whether text-to-text models like GPT-4 or text-to-text models. image models like Midjourney. The New York Times, for example, sued OpenAI and Microsoft in December for copyright infringement, claiming the plaintiffs illegally used material from the post to train OpenAI’s large language model.
Given the state of these morally complex and ongoing legal battles, many marketers are, at this time, likely reluctant to incorporate AI-generated images or text into their advertising campaigns. As Bert Marissen, creative director of TBWA/Chiat/Day LA, says: “There are still many legal challenges for brands that want to widely adopt generative AI in high-profile locations. »
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