Anthropic’s culture, storytelling, and aesthetics are perhaps the best in the modern valley. This is enshrined in their stellar retention and their product (Claude, Claude’s constitution).

But they have a big consumer marketing problem. Their story isn’t widely heard or legible to the greater cultural conscience.[0]

To me it’s a puzzle–how can a company so good at aesthetics and narrative engineering (literally held together by essays, vision, and shared morality) be so bad at this?

know your audience

The root of the issue is one of legibility and micro-empathy. I think Anthropic has excellent global empathy–a sense of indebtedness to humankind. However, I also think Elon Musk has a similar (though more neurotic/maniacal) sense of indebtedness.[1]

There is this distance between the median person and the average Anthropic employee. I think it is similar in form not only to Elon Musk, but perhaps a philsopher king (in the greek sense). A sort of classism.

This is somewhat natural when you feel as if you are the harbingers of a fundamental change which we are on a precipice of. Especially when you feel no one is paying attention/cares and giving requisite weight to the matter. Perhaps not verbalized, the instinctive assumption to make is that these people are simply not smart enough. To impose a distance, an intellectual othering. But I would offer an alternate perspective. There is a reason human’s have endured, an evolutionary pressure that carefully mediates the distribution of people in a society, optimizing for fitness/proliferation. Human consensus via our self-arranging social groups is not only a medley of noise and anti-patterns, but what gives rise to peculiar synchronicity.

In other words, it’s your job to convince the people to share in the fruits of your labour.

What is the point of marketing that only resonates to a very specific archetype of EA adjacent tech bro? They almost always already know and have reverence for Anthropic.

lived issues (super bowl ad)

Every decent consumer startup led by a product brained visionary will never mention or take a jab at competitors. Why? Because competition is for losers.

No one is comparing the specs of an iPhone to an android… Even in b2b, I would never want my startup to be compared in a table with a competitor in some exec presentation. Because i’m not selling a product. I’m selling a future, a narrative, a story.

It is viscerally important to have aligned (to co-opt Anthropic’s own verbiage) story-telling. Anthropic needs to be selling a future with a country of geniuses in a datacenter.

From purely a marketing/execution perspective, there are also many things topically wrong with the ad.

It is almost completely not eye catching and is, frankly, unintelligible in almost every way. I am going to walk you through the median Super Bowl watchers experience.

I randomly see some guy with a weird verbal affect that I can’t quite pin down talking. I have no clue what he’s talking about, something random about short kings (reads: cringe for young audience, esoteric for old ones). It’s not clear he’s AI. Then, if I am still by some miracle paying attention I hear “AI without ads”, and I don’t even remember what company it is.

I don’t care about AI with ads because I’ve never experienced it. It’s not annoying. It’s not top of mind. I only remember this ad for its bizarrerie.

worked example: my take on what they should’ve run

Let’s look to a Super Bowl ad that was extremely legible and well loved by the exact person furthest from Anthropic’s purview: the Budweiser ad (my personal favorite).

It’s mysterious and interesting, random and funny, and distinctly American/Bud. There was unresolved intrigue. Pure aesthetics, incisive w.r.t. the cultural conscious.

It was perfectly modern, post-ironic. Leaning into the cliche an absurd amount, different from the mean enough to capture initial attention.[2]

What I would do is this. Imaging the setting, a black screen, a single Clawd mascot (pictured below) furiously whizzing around, making cutesy noises, subtly invoking Wall-E type energy. It is working on some sort of mechanism, though it’s not clear what.

When it’s done, we zoom out, the cute little thing was building a rocket. We subvert the expectations, the cute thing was doing Serious Work.

Zoom out again, there are 1000s of Clawds, subvert again. Each is writing code, building rockets, etc.

Cut to black. Text on screen: “A country of rocket scientists in a data center.” then the “rocket scientists” part flips out with an animation and turns into “coders” “researchers” etc finally it settles on “geniuses”.

“Build the future with claude.ai”

Declare the vision for the world to see.

[0] Although perhaps it’s not pertinent from an impact perspective to excel at consumer marketing because their core business is not consumer adjacent. Perhaps not diluting/repackaging aesthetics for consumer audiences is intentional. (though their recent efforts diminish this hypothesis, and narrative engineering is distillation, not dilution, when done right.

[1] This is not necessarily an unbridled endorsement, but a contrasting illumination of the very limitations of macro-empathy. It is very easy to see that Elon Musk believes he owes it to humanity to get us on mars, to ascend the Kardashev tech tree. Which is ultimately for the success of humankind and our progeny.

[2] This is a very common move in modernity when dealing with the abject hyperreality that surrounds us. We cannot simply pronounce something, this is too dialectic, too critiqueable. We must preempt the critique, the mocking, by doing it ourselves. In this sense, we have laundered the original message. Post-irony, a constant hedging, is one of the only effective vehicles for moralized communication outside hegemonic, domineering in group signifiers.