How do you say "hope" in French?
Remembering that Humanity > Efficiency (this seems to be a theme around here...) while watching the World Cup
Haven’t been inspired to drop everything and slam on the keys in a while. Especially here. Especially especially during the second half of a World Cup quarterfinal. But here we are.
It’s just been so long… so fucking long… since I’ve seen something - anything! - in brand marketing that feels good… that feels like something the world can learn from.
We’ve spent the better part of the last decade (in tech, especially…) treating marketing like an optimization problem instead of a storytelling one.
No shade to the product leads and performance marketers who have been tasked with shaping the beats of these communications… they’re incredibly talented at building incredible things and at putting relevant messages in front of a parched buyer at a thirsty moment… But at some point all the conversation about widget optimization just becomes its own arrogant form of gatekeeping.
Great brand storytelling has never been about getting attention. It’s always been about building a relationship and earning trust. Attention is cheap - it can be bought and paid for. Trust has to be earned.
Historically, brands earned it by making the customer the hero of a world built by the brand.
Apple invited you to think different*.
Nike invited you to find your greatness.
Patagonia invited you to protect what’s wild.
Airbnb invited you to belong.
None of those stories started with the product. They started with a belief about the world, and an invitation to become someone within it… equal parts aspiration and inspiration. Stories about what’s possible.
(* this is an intentionally grammatically incorrect campaign.)
(goal Mbappe, 1-0 France…)
Which brings us to AI.
AI companies are up against a branding problem I can’t remember another category having to solve. Depending on the study, somewhere between 50-70% of Americans are more worried than excited about artificial intelligence, and a majority believe its risks to society outweigh its benefits. That’s not “OpenAI isn’t a brand for me”… it’s somewhere between a skepticism and an outright rejection of the future itself.
These brands have to first convince people the world they’re building is one worth wanting in the first place. So how do you tell a heroic story to an audience that doesn’t even believe in the world you’re inviting them into?
You shut the fuck up and you listen.
(goal Dembele, 2-0 France…)
Enter Anthropic’s new Claude campaign (and coordinated / corresponding landing page experience), There’s Hope in Hard Questions, which was the inspo for slamming on the keys today. I - and maybe you too - just saw it for the first time during halftime on the Fox broadcast.
(Ed. note: this is also a much better use of the concept of a question as a device than Polymarket’s incredibly embarrassing Rick Rubin campaign.)
Watch it below, and understand how sophisticated this is. Think about what it makes you believe about Anthropic / Claude. And think about why that’s important. And remember it’s one of a number of coordinated moves to build public trust that has been a huge reason why Anthropic is the fastest growing company from a revenue perspective in the history of recorded business.
Whether any of the competing AI companies ultimately cares about anything beyond shareholder value is beside the point. Eventually the LLM models will converge. They’ll all be remarkably capable. They’ll all answer the same questions. Intelligence will become a commodity.
The era about proving intelligence in AI is over (thank god)… the next will be about proving you are worthy of humanity’s trust. The winner won’t necessarily have the best product with the most widgets, it will be the one telling the most believable (and desired!!) story about the role AI should play in human life.
(2-0 to France, 81st minute…)
Ad:
Landing page: https://claude.com/hard-questions