Anthropic Savagely Mocks OpenAI In Super Bowl Ad Blitz · Watch The Entire Campaign (Below)
Satirizing and mocking your opponents is an effective form of persuasion. But, you better have the goods.
By Mark Whitney
Everybody loves a funny, ballsy ad campaign.
I built my software company exclusively with a newsletter that we persistently emailed to 1M+ lawyers every week for more than 15 years. Our competition was two multibillion dollar, multinational publishers: Reuters (Westlaw) and Reed Elsevier (Lexis-Nexis).
Based on my personal experience with the criminal justice system, I had concluded that these companies were bad for America.
The way I framed the situation for the lawyers was that they had been victimized by two foreign corporations, Westlaw owned by a Canadian outfit and Lexis owned by some clowns in London. Then we have you, the loyal American attorney, who already sent your hard-earned tax dollars to the people down at the IRS so Congress could make laws and courts could write opinions construing them.
Why should you have to pay these soulless, foreign interlopers a second time, when all they do is scrape public records off your government’s servers, re-bundle them, and sell them back to you for more than your car payment.
How are you going to do God’s work solving the everyday legal problems for workaday Americans from your humble corner office on Mainstreet USA, when we have this menacing situation whereby Wall Street-traded corporations, insurance companies, and governmental instrumentalities have unfettered access to all of the law from the comfort of their climate controlled watchtower, while you poor schmucks are schlepping halfway across the state to a law library or calling a colleague to see if they might have a book that can provide guidance?
Stop the madness!
Our campaigns were often defined by satire, irony, and most frequently, mocking. Our most effective recurring campaign was when we linked to a story in the Washington Post about a lawyer who shot his computer. Our take?
“The article was silent as to whether he used West or Lexis.”
We gently and regularly poked West and Lexis for being a duopoly. Our campaigns were so effective that eventually Lexis leveraged their economic superiority, retaining a Who’s Who of D.C. Dipshits, in an ironic attempt to sue us out of business. It did not go well for them. Why? Because everything we said was true and we had the goods!
The fantastic Anthropic campaign that inspired this post was created by Mother. But the flawless creative execution is not the hardest part of a campaign like this. The hardest part is convincing your client to actually run the commercials. That’s where the real salesmanship comes in as Jon Hamm’s Emmy Award-winning Don Draper character teaches in this iconic pitch session from a 2008 episode of Mad Men.
