The Reason Amazon Ad Wants Alexa To Feel Normal, Google Waxes Nostalgic

They get it, big tech does. They recognize that their human users increasingly understand how they are being manipulated and taken advantage of, while the owners of tech companies vie for who can own more expensive houses to say nothing of escape fortresses in New Zealand for when the torches and pitchforks come out in earnest. 

So they are trying to pitch themselves - even, or especially, in Super Bowl  ads - as normal, caring parts of human life, like an old aunt who happens to be an algorithm. You may not like her political views, but you're not going to lock her away. Or are you? JL


Dieter Bohn reports in The Verge:

The Amazon motive is clear: make Alexa seem like an integral part of our lives, like electricity or running water. But do that in a way that makes it seem lighthearted and fun, not oppressive. Google went directly to the emotional jugular. It is about how a computer could help, but dystopian if you think about sharing your fond remembrances with an uncaring algorithm instead of other actual humans. Does it feel crass and manipulative that we will have some emotional connection to an ephemeral piece of software instead of a physical token?

Happy Friday — the Super Bowl is this weekend and some of the ads have begun to be released. The two that have struck me the most are from Google and Amazon, each taking a different tack to sell you on their respective intelligent assistants.

They are very different. Amazon got Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi leading off the joke about what life was like before Alexa, then people asking other people throughout history things they’d normally ask Alexa. I was with it until there was a joke about refusing to erase the Nixon tapes which maybe was a little too on the nose given this past year’s voice-recording scandals.

In any case, the motive is clear: make Alexa seem like an integral part of our lives now, like electricity or running water. But do that in a way that makes it seem lighthearted and fun, not oppressive. The ad mostly works on both of those levels. If you’re Amazon and you want to try to affect people’s feelings about Alexa, I don’t know that you could possibly do better than associating a little of Ellen with Alexa.

Just, you know, it’s still okay to ask real people questions.

Google, meanwhile, went directly for the emotional jugular in a spot so blatantly designed to tug at your heartstrings it was immediately uncomfortable to the point where it felt manipulative. It felt that way all the more so because it was based on a real relative of a Google employee.

In the spot, an 85-year-old widower asks Google to bring up various memories he has of his late wife, then says “remember when” about those moments. Guess what? That’s a little-known Google Assistant feature, asking it to remember things. It is very earnest if you think about how a computer could help, but also very dystopian if you think about sharing your fond remembrances with an uncaring algorithm instead of other actual humans.

This is very nearly a trend now, by the way. Apple also recently created an ad that played on our emotions and sympathies for a widower who was brought to a tearful moment through the medium of technology (an iPad keynote presentation). Apple, at least, had the presence of mind to include actual human relatives in its ad to share that moment, instead of it being simply shared with a smart display.

Tying a product to deep emotions is an ad tale as old as time, I suppose. And I would argue that we are going to need to find better ways to talk about how we invest genuine sentiment, nostalgia, and loving affection into our digital lives. Nobody would bat an eye at a commercial with a Kodak print in the ‘80s pulling exactly these same tricks, but somehow when you integrate software it still feels different — even though both are technological products. It probably won’t feel different for very long.

Speaking of Kodak, Google’s ad reminds me of nothing so much as the famous Mad Men Don Draper Carousel pitch. Only now, instead of a slide projector, it’s a smart display. I’ll quote it in full below — tell me this couldn’t be the pitch for Google’s ad if you changed just a few words.

Well, technology is a glittering lure. But, uh, there is the rare occasion when the public can be engaged on a level beyond flash, if they have a sentimental bond with the product. My first job, I was in-house at a fur company, with this old-pro copywriter, a Greek named Teddy. Teddy told me the most important idea in advertising is new. Creates an itch. You simply put your product in there as a kind of calamine lotion. But he also talked about a deeper bond with the product. Nostalgia. It’s delicate, but potent. Sweetheart. Teddy told me that in Greek, “nostalgia” literally means “the pain from an old wound”. It’s a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone. This device isn’t a spaceship, it’s a time machine. It goes backwards, forwards, takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It’s not called the wheel. It’s called the carousel. It lets us travel the way a child travels. Round and around, and back home again, to a place where we know we are loved.

Does it feel really crass and manipulative for a company to say that a technological product driven by machine-learning algorithms will help us remember our lost loved ones? That we will have some sort of emotional connection to an ephemeral piece of software instead of a physical token? Yes.

Is all of that inevitable? Is it in fact already happening every day? Also yes. We should probably figure out what that means.