By: mak
February 4th, 2019
Super Bowl TV commercials 2019 .
As a casual observer and commercial viewer to this year’s SuperBowl, it was not lost on me that seemingly every other TV ad featured a robot, robot-like thing, home speaker personality, or some different interpretation of “the machines are coming.”
These ads are expensive to air, but the production process behind them is also months in the making, involving teams of decision makers at both the agencies and the companies/brands. Given how many different brands and ad agencies leaned in this direction – based in part on consumer research, suggest we are at an inflection point with this kind of “machine” technology.
This was not necessarily a scary thing as much as a moment where the collective American culture, or at least the people at the ad agencies and brands that make the ads seem to embrace and mainstream this AI, VR, robot reality, not so much in the future – but here now.
If the SuperBowl is one of the last “everyone is watching” appointment viewing platforms of our time, then it stands to reason that the cues the public takes from the trapping of this event – in this case, the commercials – help shape and reinforce the cultural reality in which we all live.
Putting aside if the ads were “good” or “bad” a takeaway here is that this new technology evolution seems to have entered the mainstream. It has begun to ease from the Future to the Now.
It will be interesting to see how a full embrace of these technologies might further change the traditional relationships of these sort technology from that of expensive or exotic science fiction to that of the nonchalant, everyday use.
If so, this year’s batch of SuperBowl ads, through a range of different products, categories, and personalities that amplified them, might have played a significant role.