Ben Guttmann
We’ve had the TV on a lot recently. I guess that’s what having a new baby will do – lots of time at home coaxing them to sleep in front of a screen playing something you don’t have to pay all that much attention to. For us, it’s mostly a few old sitcoms, a little bit of news, and whatever sport is currently on offer.
Through all that background noise, I’ve seen two starkly different messages come up again and again that I thought were worth calling out.
If you’ve had the Olympics on at all this weekend, you’ve seen this ad for Google’s AI offerings about three times every hour. In it, a dad uses AI to write a letter to his daughter’s favorite track star. Take a look:
This commercial completely whiffs it. Nobody wants this. Effective messages sell the hole, not the drill. But this ad isn’t doing that, and it isn’t even selling the drill. It’s selling “let’s not drill a hole and say we did.”
The whole point of a fan letter is that it’s the product of an authentic connection between the fan and the hero. The fan shares how much the hero means to them. The recipient gets a heartfelt reminder that their work has meant something. The humanity, imperfections and all, is the whole thing. That’s what both sides actually want!
Turns out, I’m not the only person who has noticed how much this stinks. TechCrunch wrote about it. Reddit has picked it up. And a few other outlets have commented on the cringe as well.
It’s been a hell of a month in US politics, and we enter the final hundred days of this presidential campaign with a whole new race – and one whole new candidate. After Vice President Harris sewed up the Democratic nomination, her campaign released their first official ad – and it is a masterclass in empathetic communication.
In the narration, Harris proclaims, “We choose freedom.” Freedom to get ahead, freedom to be safe from gun violence, freedom to make decisions about one’s own body.
Freedom. It’s a simple idea. We all understand it, and we all want it. Most of all, it’s a stark contrast to the former Biden campaign’s leading argument about “protecting democracy.”
“Protecting democracy” is insider talk. It’s process, not outcomes. We don’t go through our daily lives thinking about the abstract concept of democracy – rather, we think about all those things enumerated in the ad.
This argument is a winner.
