While the Seattle Seahawks demolished the New England Patriots on the pitch during Super Bowl LX, a similar drubbing was taking place off the pitch, in the AI-vs-AI contest playing out during commercial breaks. Here, Anthropic emerged as the uncontested winner, using commercial breaks to target OpenAI’s decision test ads on ChatGPT.
According to a report by CNBCwhich cited data analyzed by BNP Paribas, Anthropic’s ad campaign during Super Bowl LX delivered the biggest user boost of any AI company advertising during the game.
Reportedly, daily active users of Anthropic’s Clause AI chatbot rose 11%, while visits to its website increased by 6.5%.
This translated to direct gains for the app, with the spike in interest taking it into the top 10 free apps on the Apple App Store, surpassing rivals Open AI, Google Gemini and Meta.
In comparison, ChatGPT saw a 2.7% increase in daily active users after the Super Bowl game, while Gemini added just 1.4%.
The ad campaign that shook OpenAI
Instead of being a typical product pitch, Anthropic aired multiple spots, bearing the ominous titles ‘Betrayal’, ‘Deception’, ‘Treachery’, and ‘Violation’.
Each of these spots depicted absurd, dystopian scenarios where AI assistants began blurting out ads mid-conversation.
“Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude,” Anthropic’s spots read.
The timing of the campaign, which came weeks after OpenAI announced its decision to test ads on ChatGPT, was perhaps impeccable, with New York University marketing professor Scott Galloway and Prof G Markets podcast host describing it as “seminal moment”.
But why did it succeed? Well, it may have had something to do with human psychology.
‘It’s frightening…’
Galloway explained that Anthropic’s clear product differentiation—no ads—resonated with people.
“It’s relevant because the number one use case for AI is therapy. People are revealing their most intimate questions and concerns,” the professor said.
“The thought that OpenAI is going to take all your personal information and start saying, ‘You seem to be suffering from depression; have you thought about Lexapro?’ It’s frightening,” he wrote.
Sam Altman’s pointed response
OpenAI chief Sam Altman’s defensive response didn’t help either.
Taking to
“Our most important principle for ads says that we won’t do exactly this; we would obviously never run ads in the way Anthropic depicts them. We are not stupid and we know our users would reject that,” Altman wrote.
He also took a few shots at Anthropic itself, saying it serves “an expensive product to rich people”.
“We are glad they do that and we are doing that too, but we also feel strongly that we need to bring AI to billions of people who can’t pay for subscriptions,” the OpenAI chief said.
Accusing Anthropic of wanting to “control what people do with AI”, Altman charged, “…they want to write the rules themselves for what people can and can’t use AI for, and now they also want to tell other companies what their business models can be.”
This sharp response, however, was a strategic error according to Galloway.
“Altman’s response was a mistake. When you’re the market leader, you don’t reference the competition. You never talk about them. Hertz never referenced Avis. Coke never referenced Pepsi. If he’d been asked about it, he should have said, ‘I’ve seen it. It’s a great ad. Good for them.’ Anything beyond that looks defensive,” wrote the NYU prof.
