AI Permeates the Adver’ Bowl

Like it or not, artificial intelligence can’t be avoided. It’s in the news each and every day, and on the tongues of students, professors, influencers, and office workers. When I visit LinkedIn, I am flooded with full-throated enthusiasm for AI. Even the Super Bowl has been taken over by AI. Did you know that 23% of Super Bowl commercials—15 out of the 66 ads—featured AI?

Trishla Ostwald, writing for Adweek, suggested, “Yet much of these advertisements struggled to clearly articulate what sets one offering apart from another, even as AI becomes mainstream.”

In my estimation, one AI company did set itself apart. Anthropic ran two Super Bowl ads that took a hard stand. The ads made it clear that Claude, Anthropic’s AI agent, will never rely on or run ads (and that companies planning to run ads, like ChatGPT, risk creeping people out).

Of course, the Super Bowl may not be the best venue for a nuanced argument of this sort. Sammi Scharninghausen, brand analyst at iSpot, told Adweek, “Claude’s ads have done a good job of stoking conversations and controversy online, but the ads do not test well among general population audiences with confusion around the message and execution.”

Maybe ads don’t always need to test well to be effective. Maybe ads merely need to intrigue and drive people to test the product for themselves. According to TechCrunch, in the days following the big game, Claude climbed from No. 41 on the U.S. App Store to No. 7 — its highest rank to date — suggesting its “no ads” pitch resonates strongly with users.

Naturally, there’s a difference between a “user” of AI and the “general population audiences” referenced by iSpot’s analyst. While AI seems omnipresent to this observer, recent statistics tell a different story about the adoption of this technology. According to Microsoft, the U.S. leads in both AI infrastructure and frontier model development, but in 2025 it fell from 23rd to 24th place in AI usage among the working age population, with a 28.3 percent usage rate.

In related news, advertiser perceptions of AI don’t align with consumer attitudes. Shocking! While 82% of ad executives believe Gen Z and Millennials feel very or somewhat positive about AI-generated ads, just 45% of people in these age groups actually feel that way, and the gap is widening, according to the IAB.