Anthropic definitely won the Super Bowl this year, but let's take a look at some other commercial highlights from companies we follow.
- Amazon Alexa+ – Chris Hemsworth holds snakes, fights bears, survives drowning and an exploding house, but fears AI, until it starts making his life easier. I liked that Amazon addressed consumer fears of having AI in their homes in a playful way.
- Ring – Another Amazon spot that showcases Ring doorbells and cameras' abilities to use AI to help find lost pets in the neighborhood. Boring commercial, but a cool feature I didn't know about.
- Meta AI – Meta showcases its “athletic intelligence” through extreme use cases of its Oakley smart glasses with people jumping out of airplanes, skateboarding, mountain biking, and break dancing. Cool, high-energy commercial that showcased their smart glasses' ability to record footage, play music, and answer questions on the go.
- Google Gemini – Google went the heart-warming route this year, featuring a mother and daughter designing the child's bedroom and creating an outdoor garden space with Nano Banana image simulations. Honestly, it was a super cute ad, but maybe I'm just a sappy dad now.
- Ramp AI – Imagine an office full of Kevin Malones! Ramp's commercial said, “Multiply what's possible,” and featured a fictitious office full of Kevins doing work, ending with two Kevins carrying a pot of chili. As an Office fan, I of course loved this one. Although they missed the opportunity for him to say, “Why waste time use lot of AI when Ramp do trick?” Maybe that'll be for his next spot.
- Ripple – As soon as I saw Tim Robinson, I was in, but then Ripple lost me because their commercial was boring. Why did they feature a toned down version of Robinson? They should've let him go into full character.
- Wix – Wix went full-on inspirational this year showcasing how easy it is to build websites on their Harmony platform. This was a swing and a miss in my opinion, and the commercial could've featured any AI website builder. It wasn't a memorable spot.
- Xfinity – They went the nostalgic path this year with a Jurassic Park remake where an Xfinity technician gets the park back online before the dinosaurs take over. “That could've been bad.” Pretty funny! I didn't LOL, but I definitely expelled air from my nostrils at a higher velocity than usual.
- Squarespace – They usually make pretty good commercials, but their Super Bowl spot had some steep competition this year. This one featured Emma Stone in an old-school horror movie attempting to buy EmmaStone.com, but having the domain unavailable. The commercial ended with “Get your domain before you lose it.” The actual website is an extension of that ad, which was a fun detail.
- Instacart – The groceries platform enlisted Ben Stiller to sing in a 1980s-themed band about “Instacart letting you choose your bananas.” It was okay, but I doubt the song will go viral.
- Grubhub – Their commercial showed a group of wealthy people sitting around at a dinner table arguing about who's going to eat the fees, which were depicted as the final course of the meal, only for George Clooney to appear and say, “Grubhub will eat the fees.” The commercial ended with a promo for “No fees on restaurant orders over $50.” I admit that my first thought was, “Wait, Grubhub will eat the fees? Or the restaurants will eat the fees?”