Watched the Super Bowl tonight mostly for the ads, which I know makes me a bad guest at any watch party (my brother-in-law was not thrilled that I kept talking through the Chiefs' second-quarter drive because a Hyundai commercial had just ended and I wanted to talk about it instead). Chiefs beat the 49ers, it went back and forth more than I expected, Kansas City pulled away late. Fine game. Not what I want to write about.
What I want to write about is the Google ad. The one where the older guy is using Google Assistant to help him remember stuff about his late wife, Loretta. He asks it to remind him of her jokes, pull up old photos, that kind of thing. It's a minute long, no dialogue except him talking to his phone, and by the end half of Twitter was saying they cried and the other half was saying Google was using a dead woman to sell phones.
I'm somewhere in between, but honestly closer to the second camp, and I want to explain why because "ads shouldn't make you cry" isn't actually my objection.
My objection is narrower than that. It's that the ad works by making Google Assistant look like a memory-keeper, a thing that holds onto the parts of a person you're scared of losing. And that's a genuinely nice idea for a feature. Google Photos search, voice reminders, all of that is useful and I use it. But the emotional weight of the ad is doing work that the actual product doesn't really do. It's not storing his memories, it's running search queries against photos he already took and playing back things he already told it to save. The ad wants you to feel like the assistant is doing something tender and human. What it's actually doing is fetching. There's a difference, and a 60-second Super Bowl spot with a slow piano track is exactly the format built to blur it.
I don't think this makes Google evil or anything, don't get me wrong. It's an ad. Ads have always oversold what a product feels like to use. I just think this one oversold it in a direction that's more uncomfortable than usual, because grief isn't really a category products should be reaching for, even gently, even well-shot (and it was well shot, I'll give them that — the guy's face at the end when he plays back her voice, that's not a cheap trick, that's a good performance and good editing).
Other ads I clocked, quickly, because I don't want this to turn into a full rundown that every other tech blog is already doing this week: the Hyundai one with the Boston accents was genuinely funny, "smaht pahk" is going to be a phrase people say for the next six months whether they want to or not. The Amazon one with Alexa's "voice" going through history (Sarah Michelen Gellar, Ozzy Osbourne bits) was fine, forgettable in a week. There was a Bloomberg campaign ad in there too which is its own weird category of "is this even the same kind of ad."
Small tangent, since I'm already off track: Tesla's stock has been doing something genuinely bizarre the last couple weeks. It closed out Friday north of $650, which is something like 40-something percent higher than where it sat two weeks earlier, after a solid earnings report last Wednesday. I don't have a Tesla opinion that's interesting enough to build a whole post around, I just think it's funny that a car company can move that much in ten trading days and the general reaction from most people I know is a shrug. We've gotten numb to stock charts that look like that when the word "tech" is attached to the company, even when the company mostly makes cars.
Anyway. The Loretta ad is the one I'll remember out of tonight, more than the game itself if I'm honest, and more than I think Google actually wanted people to remember it — as a slightly uncomfortable thing rather than a warm one. I don't think that was the intent. I think it worked exactly as designed for most people watching, and I was just in the smaller group that noticed the seams.
Football's still on in the background as I type this, some post-game desk analysis I'm not really listening to. Going to bed after this paragraph.