Once upon a time during the month of February, sports enthusiasts and non-sports enthusiasts shake hands on the common ground of enjoying one thing: Super Bowl commercials. In a world where advertisements are displayed anywhere from home refrigerators to what feels like every single website, the game day is the one where there are less groans and sighs heard around the world when there’s a commercial break, despite more breaks than regular season games.
The price to purchase commercial airtime during the Super Bowl has increased each year, with companies spending anywhere from $8 million to $10 million on airtime this year. To get the most bang from their buck, Super Bowl commercials juice up the ethos, pathos, and logos by taking captures of the state of the world. Sometimes they feature celebrities that, in no way, correlate with the product, poke fun at a cultural moment, or pull at the strings of our hearts with animals.
For a marketer, these commercials are their own Super Bowl — a once-a-year opportunity where every penny goes towards not only hooking the viewer’s attention, but keeping it. The type of commercials that are talked about the next day amongst peers or become cultural landmarks such as Budweiser’s 2000 “Whassup.”
Well, this year was… They were definitely commercials! Don’t get me wrong, there were plenty of enjoyable commercials and moments, such as Pepsi’s “The Choice” commercial that took a jab at the Coldplay concert scandal, or Bosch’s “JustaGuy” with an eerily dull Guy Fieri. Alongside these comical commercials, however, came the vibe-killing chaser of Ring’s “Be a Hero in your Neighborhood.”
The 30-second commercial appeals to our emotions right away, discussing the number of lost animals each year. Ring showed their Search Party feature, which was launched in October, as the new way to find missing animals. Using AI, Ring can “tap in” to neighborhood Ring cameras and search for possible matches of a provided description, creating an automated surveillance system.
Controversy sparked right away across the internet as people began to wonder if using Search Party for lost animals is a Trojan horse into a dystopian future of surveilling people. The backlash Ring faced even caused a cancellation of their integration with Flock Safety, another company that has been juggling public trust. In internal emails sent to Ring employees obtained by an employee from 404 Media, reads as follows:
“I believe that the foundation we created with Search Party, first for finding dogs, will end up becoming one of the most important pieces of tech and innovation to truly unlock the impact of our mission. You can now see a future where we are able to zero out crime in neighborhoods. So many things to do to get there but for the first time ever we have the chance to fully complete what we started.”
Ring founder Jamie Siminoff
While Ring technology has facial recognition features for their Familiar Faces tool that can recognize people on the doorbell, Ring states that the technology used for Search Party doesn’t process human biometrics or track people. Taking into account Ring’s 2023 FTC settlement on accusations of employees having unauthorized access to customer videos without consent, using customer videos to train algorithms, and failing to secure accounts against hackers, time will tell on the privacy follow through for these newer features.
Ironically, Ring paying anywhere from $8 million to $10 million to air the 30-second commercial to promote their newest feature had the complete opposite effect, with users such as Maggie Butler removing home Ring cameras.
In recent days, questions have continually been raised about privacy in the home surveillance sector, with Google-owned Nest under scrutiny for the video investigation of Nancy Guthrie’s abduction. The video footage of an armed and masked man on Guthrie’s doorsteps was initially thought to be lost because the camera was offline and Guthrie didn’t have a subscription to the service. Despite these factors, Nest cameras still send footage to servers across the country and world before being purged or moved to a separate storage area, which FBI Director Kash Patel said was, “recovered from residual data located in backend systems.”
User agreements and the notoriously long terms and conditions are crucial to read now more than ever, as users of home surveillance cameras do not own the footage, but rather, the companies do. Agreeing to cloud-based storage means limiting physical agency to their own data, granting companies and governments control in a one-sided relationship, continually pushed by technology.
