This Is Exactly What the Peak Looks Like - AI Mania, 100-Year Bonds, and The Super Bowl Stock Market Curse..
- Catherine Cashmore
- Feb 14
- 62 min read
PLUS interview with Callum Newman - the former editor of Australian Small-Cap Investigator at Fat Tail Investment Research, and now Senior Editor at Marcus Today.
Amid the noise surrounding the Super Bowl half-time show the other week – the media reaction, the outrage, the endless commentary over Puerto Rican Latino artist Bad Bunny performing almost entirely in Spanish – something else quietly passed by the gossip channels.
The ads.
Not just the cost of them. The dominance.
Sixteen technology firms reportedly spent between US$8m and US$10m for 30 seconds of airtime.
Depending on where you put the final tally, that’s somewhere up to US$160m in one evening – and almost all of it was on AI.
OpenAI. Anthropic. Meta. Amazon. Google.
Artificial intelligence, once confined to research labs and venture capital pitch decks, is now buying America’s most expensive television real estate.
Reuters described the Super Bowl as having become a “marketing battleground for AI companies,” highlighting OpenAI and Anthropic directly promoting their AI coding tools to mass audiences.
New York Magazine described the ads more bluntly, pointing out that… “The tech industry is all in on AI… but it’s still not quite sure what story it should be telling.”
Meta, which has been struggling to stay part of the broader AI conversation, crammed the phrase “Athletic Intelligence” into a celeb-filled ad for its Oakley-branded smart-video glasses…
Amazon’s ad cast Chris Hemsworth as an extreme AI paranoiac, which would have been funnier if a single person had ever confused actual Alexa for smart or cunning…
Ramp, another company that’s not primarily known as an AI firm, cast Kevin from The Office in an ad about how AI will make your job incredibly easy without getting into the obvious follow-up question of whether or not you’ll get to keep it...
But the bigger story seems to be that paying extraordinary $$s for a few seconds of Super Bowl time has an unfortunate habit of coinciding with peaks rather than beginnings.
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