Advertising's Big Day

Commercials, AI screwups, and Prada 👠

Tomorrow, I’ll be watching the Super Bowl from my girlfriend’s brother-in-law’s parents’ house on Long Island. I’ll be meeting some new people, including a brand-new little baby. I’ll be hunting my way around a long table of Italian sandwiches, Italian pastas, and Italian pastries to find something I’m able to eat. I’ll be nodding along politely as the men bond over sports, and nodding along intensely when Kendrick appears so that nobody pulls my attention away and I miss the “minorrrrrrr” moment.

Unlike holidays that keep us within our own homes, the Super Bowl spills out into bars, living rooms, and watch parties where coworkers, neighbors, and total strangers find themselves side by side, reacting in unison to the same plays, the same spectacle, the same impossibly expensive and overanalyzed commercials (please don’t call them ‘spots’ around the civilians). It is, for a few hours, a rare reprieve from the isolated glow of our personal screens—our attention is locked not on our phones, but on a single, communal screen where narratives unfold in real time. For all its bombast and commercial excess, the Super Bowl remains one of the only American events left that reminds us what it feels like to watch together, react together, and belong to something bigger than ourselves.

Enjoy being a little part of it.

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• Burger King Denies Terminating Dentsu Contract as Instagram Post Indicated I just don’t think I’m as interested in this story as the rest of Adland. But if we find out the reasons why the poster did this, you have my attention.

• Google went all-in on Gemini AI product demos for their Super Bowl campaign, and the copy it wrote was full of errors. First, lol. “An ad for Wisconsin Cheese Mart opened with a worker at the shop saying in a voiceover, ‘There’s more cows in Wisconsin than there are people.’ There aren’t…Later in the ad, Gemini is seen crafting website copy, being asked to write Gouda cheese facts. Gemini writes: ‘It is one of the most popular cheeses in the world, accounting for 50 to 60 percent of the world’s cheese consumption.’ Gouda does not account for that much of the cheese market.”

• Early Meta employee sues for sexual harassment, gender discrimination Full disclosure, Kelly was my manager for part of the time I was contracting at Meta. This was not an easy read (read it anyway), but it was lightened by picturing Sheryl Sandberg playing beer pong.

• Should I start a series critiquing the rotating ads outside my window? Did Mischief win the Mullvad VPN account? Because spelling it 'micro target' is going to end with me ranting on LinkedIn about the decline of the ad industry. (Editor’s note: This is the only part of this newsletter I checked for typos.)

  

• Prada partnered with award-winning novelist Ottessa Moshfegh on a set of short stories based on their collection and featuring Carey Mulligan. I’ll probably write more about this because I love “branded content” and I love lit fiction. Jealous of this one.

  

• JOBS I’m intentionally leaving out Amazon this week to make room for some other interesting jobs being posted:

  • Cleo, Executive Creative Director - Brand

  • Vimeo, VP Brand and Creative

  • Patreon, Executive Creative Director

  • OS Studios, Creative Director - Experiential

  • Suki, Head of Creative

  • Condé Nast, US Creative Director - AD

  • 160over90, Creative Director, Copy

  • Shark Beauty, Creative Director

  • Nike, Art Director, Brand Initiatives, Brand Design, Global

  • OLIVER Agency, Senior Creative Director

  • BBC Studios, Director, Written Content, BBC StoryWorks

  • Roblox, Creative Director, Partner Innovation Studio

  • The Coca-Cola Company, Director, Creative Excellence

• Portfolio of the Week: Dave Chau