An Unusual Advertising Strategy

Like many reputationally underwater industries before them, the LLM giants (OpenAI, Anthropic), have turned to advertising to try to buy goodwill. The twist? As Cody Delistraty put it recently in the New York Times, they’re using an “anti-AI marketing strategy.”

Using branded in-person experiences and TV ads filmed on…film, these companies are trying to make the case that AI is melded in the fabric of human life and able to enhance person-to-person connection. They’re doing so by downplaying their own products in their advertising, creating intellectual salon experiences and eschewing imagery of people on phones or computers for views of the open road.

It's an acknowledgment of general public’s pessimistic view of AI. Polling from Pew in recent months found that 50% of US adults think AI will worsen our ability to form meaningful relationships with other people vs. 5% of people who think it will make it better. And it’s not due to lack of familiarity with the tools: the number of people who say they are using AI in their jobs has risen since last year, as has the number of US adults who have used ChatGPT specifically for work, education, or entertainment.

Yet as people get to know the technology more, their opinions remain stubbornly negative. Americans have a host of industries they love to hate: pharmaceuticals, health insurers, and the oil and gas industries rank high on the list. Those industries have a strong advantage, though: people need them.

That puts these companies in a race against time, and illuminates the strategy of painting your product as a part of daily life. If they can’t actually convince people to like their products, the question becomes, can they convince enough people (and enough of the right people) that these products are necessary? That if they aren’t adopted, people will lose out not just on opportunities in business, but in life?

Perhaps, to extremely loosely phrase Machiavelli, it’s better to inspire FOMO, than to be loved.