Super Bowl LIII ads featured mermaids, Zoe Kravitz doing AMSR, and a Bud Light/ Game of Thrones crossover, but one theme appeared more than any other: technology, not only as a product, but as a cultural presence. Michelob Ultra, SimpliSafe, and Mercedes-Benz among others chose to put technology at the center of their ads with strategies ranging from comedy to dystopian fear mongering.
Clearly marketing to athletically inclined millennials, Michelob Ultra’s robots can do everything you can do – whether it’s running, spin class, or golf – but better. Well, almost everything. The ad closes with a robot staring longingly into a bar as a group of twenty-somethings laugh and sip from tall glasses of light, organic beer. The tagline: “It’s only worth it if you can enjoy it.”
A home AI device in the Pringles ad faces the same dilemma. Despite its in-depth knowledge of the hundreds of thousands of potential Pringles flavors combinations, it can never know the joy of eating a single one.
We could also add TurboTax’s RoboChild to the list of the night’s sad, sentient robots. RoboChild dreams of growing up to become a TurboTax live CPA, but his dreams are crushed when he’s informed that he’ll never the emotional complexity to help customers, emotional complexity possessed only by real human accountants, apparently. To showcase this, RoboChild replies “I am sad,” before bursting into creepy, ill-placed laughter.
SimpliSafe’s “Fear is Everywhere” is more direct in its approach. “In five years, robots will be able to do your job, and your job, and your job…” says a man at a baseball game seconds into the ad. A few rows back, a robot holding a hot dog nods knowingly. The ad cuts to a couple at an electronics store where the woman asks, “Are you listening?” The reply comes not from her husband, but from an Amazon Echo-like device, “Always, Denise.” The whole ad is a montage of modern tech-fueled anxieties, ending on the note that the best way to protect yourself and your family is with more technology from SimpliSafe.
Lastly, Mercedes-Benz was one of few to focus only on the positive. In the ad, a man is given the power to control the world around him to his will. All he has to do is say the word, the message being that to own the MBUX is have the power of a god, able to control the car and its voice-commanded technology to your every whim.
Actually, all these ads are, at their core, about control. I’m not sure everyone is as worried about a robot takeover as this year’s ads would suggest, but technology is advancing so quickly. It’s capable of doing an increasing number of jobs, better, faster, and cheaper than people ever could. If you spend enough time thinking about it, it’s easy feel out of control and maybe even a little helpless. This year’s super bowl commercials remind us of the one thing that technology will never replace, and that is the very human tendency for consumption, so crack open a can of Pringles and a cold beer. Everything is fine.
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