By Iván Mato, Executive Creative Director, Elmwood
Something unusual happened at Super Bowl LX. A brand spent millions of dollars on advertising to argue that advertising doesn’t belong everywhere. Not a dig at a rival’s soft drink. Not a cheeky comparison about car performance or beer taste. A direct, darkly comic challenge to the fundamental business model of the world’s most-used AI product.
At Elmwood, we talk about two forces that define whether a brand truly works: Intent (the clarity of purpose behind every decision) and Impact (what actually changes: behaviour, culture, competitive position). Anthropic’s Super Bowl play is one of the clearest recent examples of both working together.
This is not the competitive move we’re used to seeing at the Super Bowl. And that’s precisely the point.
More than a preference play
Comparative advertising at big sporting events has a long tradition: cheerful tribalism where the stakes are ultimately about preference, not principle. You might choose Pepsi over Coke, and the world looks more or less the same.
What Anthropic did is categorically different. The choice between an ad-funded AI and an ad-free one goes deeper than preference. It’s a structural question about whose interests the product serves. When someone asks an AI how to talk to their mother, one of the genuine, vulnerable questions dramatised in the campaign, that conversation either belongs entirely to the user, or it belongs partly to an advertiser. For a product that research increasingly shows people are using primarily for emotional support, therapy, and companionship, that distinction carries real weight.
The Intent here is clear. “Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude.” That tagline doesn’t invite debate. It closes it. And the Impact was immediate: Claude climbed from number 41 to number 7 in the US App Store within days. Daily active users jumped 11%, the largest gain across the AI category that week. Sam Altman responded with an essay-length rebuttal on X, calling the ads “clearly dishonest.” Market leaders don’t reference the competition. The moment Altman fired back, Anthropic had already won.
Two brands, two identities and what they encode
Full disclosure: at MSQ and Elmwood, Claude is our most-used AI tool, via an Enterprise licence, so the difference between these products isn’t theoretical for us. It’s lived.
And nowhere is that difference more visible than in the moment of thinking.
When ChatGPT processes your question, it shows you a pulsating black dot. Minimal, efficient, slightly ominous, an aesthetic borrowed from science fiction’s tradition of depicting AI as something cool, unknowable, and powerful. When Claude thinks, it doodles. Warm, mid-century colours. A Charles and Ray Eames version of AI, an animation that feels like someone sketching an idea on paper, creating space rather than occupying it.
That doodle is a worldview and a window into Intent: a space for thinking, not a machine processing your request. Every micro-decision in Claude’s identity, from its colour palette to the way it holds back rather than rushes to answer, points to the same organising idea: expand human thought, don’t exploit human attention.
Both brands have made another revealing creative decision: neither uses AI imagery. No algorithms, no glowing interfaces, no robots, just real actors in real locations having slightly awkward human conversations. The technology is conspicuously absent from the advertising for technology companies. The contest, it turns out, lies not in the machine room, but in the living room. Both understand that what they are selling is a feeling of being understood. They are making radically different bets about what that feeling is worth.
The promise that can’t be broken
The AI character in the Claude films, pivoting seamlessly from genuine advice to a pitch for cougar dating sites and height-boosting insoles, is a near-perfect caricature of a system optimised for engagement rather than honesty. It’s funny because it’s recognisable. And it stings because it’s only slightly exaggerated.
The promise made to 120 million Super Bowl viewers, and those of us who care more about the ads than the sport, is that Claude will never be ad-funded. Not a campaign claim. A covenant. If Anthropic holds to it, and I believe they will, the irrevocability itself becomes the competitive advantage.
Intent without Impact is just aspiration. Impact without Intent is just noise. When the two align and a brand’s deepest purpose produces a measurable shift in culture, behaviour and competitive position, that’s when advertising stops being a cost and becomes an asset.
That’s not just good advertising. That’s brand strategy.
Iván Mato is Executive Creative Director at Elmwood, a strategic brand design consultancy within the MSQ network, where he leads AI adoption and creative technology across clients including Mars, Haleon and Bausch+Lomb.
