Dear Reader,
Super Bowl advertising winners and losers, how predictive market gambling is exposing suckers and the premeditated murder of a 150-year-old newspaper. Those are your lead stories this week as I sit here enjoying a break from the freezing weather on a very quick trip to Orlando for a keynote.
The other extended stories this week include the Amazon Ring backlash, a fun video rating the accuracy of English accents put on by American actors, a chip that aims to make counterfeit luxury goods impossible and a warning from McDonald's that putting "big mac" into your password is probably a bad idea.
Finally—a big thank you to the 100-plus people who responded to my challenge last week on the 500th edition of this newsletter to find my longest continual subscriber. That honor goes to two of my longest readers (and friends!) ... Mitch Joel and Pam Slim. Both of them are authors and writers themselves, and I highly recommend you follow their insights too.
Enjoy the stories this week and stay curious!
Rohit
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This Week's New Videos ...
The Best and Worst of Super Bowl Advertising
Earlier this week I published my usual annual recap of the best and worst ads from the Super Bowl. In the days after I wrote that piece, I read many more stories about what stood out for people and for critics. Plenty commented on how the Super Bowl essentially proved that the entire US economy right now may be propped up by AI, cryptocurrency, weight loss drugs and gambling. Several talked about the lack of breakthrough creativity (which I also spotlighted). For me the biggest losers and winners in terms of marketing strategy were all about AI.
The best strategy was Anthropic positioning Claude as different because they were not accepting ads. The brilliant satire of what was clearly meant to be a typically inhuman sounding ChatGPT query result was relatable to anyone who has used AI and their message was an example of us vs. them at its finest. As one article noted, this was the best execution of this strategy since the "I'm a Mac" series of ads that differentiated Apple from PC makers.
The biggest losers were also AI focused. Genspark's tone deaf spot asking AI to "dial in this spreadsheet" while suggesting that people "take a day off" felt like a middle finger to anyone who has angst about how AI might affect their job or career ... which is a lot of people.
And the worst ad of the day came from Amazon Alexa where they imagined and visualized all the ways that AI might plot to kill you. So the strategy was to make people more afraid of AI or perhaps to prove that Alexa has an emerging skill in finding unusual ways to kill you?
As one commenter on YouTube noted: "I think this ad was made by AI except that the AI forgot to mask what it actually wants to do to us humans."
Read the full article and then hit reply (or comment on LinkedIn) to let me know if there are any you disagree with or what I missed!
The Biggest Business In America Is Growing By Betting On Your Stupidity
Gambling is officially mainstream in America, as evidenced not only by how many ads there were for gambling platforms during the Super Bowl but just how common it has become to bet on the outcomes of everything. If you're not paying attention, it might seem like this is nothing new. After all, Fantasy Football betting has been around (and advertised) for years. The difference is, so called "prediction markets" like Kalshi or Polymarket are letting people bet on everything from who the surprise musicians during the Bad Bunny Super Bowl halftime show would be to the direction of economic markets.
In traditional sports books, you're betting on specific aspects of a game like who scores the first touchdown or who will win and by what score. Despite some conspiracy theories about game fixing, when you bet on the game you're betting against the sports book (like DraftKings or FanDuels). Prediction markets are different because you're betting against other people. Hopefully dumber people.
Take, for example, the bet about the "surprise" halftime show guests. There were likely hundreds of people (from backup dancers to AV techs to stadium security guards) who already knew Lady Gaga and Ricky Martin would be performing. They are insiders and as Bloomberg reported this week, most prediction markets have bets placed by people with knowledge like that. They are essentially betting on stupid amateurs making bets against them which they have no hope of winning ... and they are collecting.
For now, this is a wild new and unregulated market which means that for a period of time there are smart bettors (known as "sharps") getting rich by preying on clueless gamblers by making well-informed bets. It's hard to blame them. Technically, they aren't doing anything illegal. It's not even unethical, really. They're just acting on information they have and making a buck at the expense of idiots. Thankfully, the fix is easy. Just don't be the idiot betting against them.
These Professors Just Proved the Power of Having a Visual Metaphor For Your Strategy
Strategy comes to life when you can make it visual. That's probably not news for most of you, but an article from HBR this week dug a bit deeper into the idea of using visual metaphors when discussing and outlining strategy. The authors not only suggested this point to be true - they actually did some research to explore the effects of a good visual metaphor and what it takes to create one. Among their more non-obvious conclusions was the point that visual "metaphor and storytelling did not change what people understood; they changed how much they cared."
"We found that a successful visual strategy metaphor has to pass what we call the 4 Fs test: It must fit the leadership style, culture, and situation of the organization; feel familiar, yet fresh to employees; and facilitate understanding about the strategy and its elements."
So if you're the sort of leader who tends to use visual metaphor and storytelling, this is an article you can bookmark and share to validate what you're doing. And if you're not, it might be an argument to start.
