Gonto:

If you think that an ad did a really good job, you do not reply with an essay. If you reply with an essay, you're losing. Like you shouldn't ignore it because that's weird either, but just say something like funny, like this time you hit us or whatever, instead of an essay, I think people would see it in a better way.

Hank:

That's a Superbowl theme. We're talking about the Superbowl, folks. Okay, so there are some good, I mean, they weren't really developer-focused ads, but there are some companies we're always talking about in there.

I think we're going to start with Claude Code or with Claude AI. So not a Claude Code app or ad. I'm very used to saying Claude Code, but Claude did these ads.

I'm sure if you're watching this, you've seen them. They had four of them and they were the like, the guy talking to his therapist or the guy talking to his like workout coach or whatever. And they, you know, they all have that, the person they're speaking to all has that uncanny GPT speak.

And then suddenly non-sequitur in the conversation, the person that the human's talking to inserts an ad. And I think the like most egregious one was the guy talking to his therapist. And then the therapist is like, yeah, like, hey, if you can't get along with your mom, maybe you can get along with these like hot cougars, like dating, sex sign.

And all of them had this like, what? And then before the Superbowl, they put these out and what did they say? They said ads are coming to AI period, but not Claude.

And it was a direct attack on OpenAI. And I guess let's stop there and we'll talk about the response later. But I mean, sounds like you love the ads.

What do you think?

Gonto:

The ad was fantastic. What I think they did a really good job is they could portray chat GPT without saying chat GPT. And I think they've done a fantastic job of that.

Like you could listen to the voice and actually see it. And you know that the ad work because some replied with a huge essay on Twitter. Like that was basically saying like, no, like this is a tacky hit.

Like we don't do this type of ads. We actually showed why blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So first of all, I like that Nikita called that out, but I think it's a good learning.

It's like if you feel that an ad did a really good job, you do not reply with an essay. If you reply with an essay, you're losing. You could say something like kudos.

You've done a great job. You shouldn't ignore it because that's weird either. But just say something like funny.

Like this time you hit us or whatever instead of an essay. I think people would see it in a better way. In this case, like it seemed that OpenAI felt threatened by it.

And I think the essay made it worse.

Hank:

Yeah. I mean, Sam talked about he's like, this feels like a dishonest attack on us. And you know, I expect more of Anthropic.

And the fact is like Anthropic did great counter positioning. And that's the first lesson to take away is like, okay, if you're going to do some sort of thing, well, I don't know, I've just been hot on this. All positioning is counter positioning term that I, you know, that just rings in my head a lot.

When I see so many dev tools and so many AI companies, they all say the same exact things. They use the same buzzwords. And if you look at the H1s, I bet if you're watching this right now, go check the H1 of your site and your top three competitors.

And I bet you use very similar language. And one of the most important things you can do is counter position. Say something different.

Frame yourself the opposite in some ways, which also for Arrested Development fans out there, I always think of Job Bluth. He opened a competing banana stand. He said the banana that won't make you sick and die.

That's like the extreme. But yeah, so Claude did a wonderful job counter positioning. Like, hey, they're going to start advertising.

We're not. Sam did a terrible job replying, adding fuel to the fire, because like when you're Coca-Cola, you're not supposed to acknowledge Pepsi. And exactly.

And he did the thing where he's like, we have more users in Texas than all of Claude has.

Gonto:

Yes. And that was clearly a PR thing, because the CMO also had that exact phrase. And then somebody else, there were three people that tweeted that exact phrase.

And that also looks like shit. Like if you have, you probably have like a PR crisis team who are telling you these are the things you should say and these are the things you shouldn't. You shouldn't all just tweet the same thing.

Like it's so fucking obvious. It looks disgusting because it looks zero genuine. And it looks like a PR agency basically managed the whole situation.

So even that was bad, not just the essay.

Hank:

Yeah, it's inauthentic. And parts of that essay by Sam also just felt inauthentic in isolation. Just, you know, him doing the whole moral high ground thing.

Like nobody wants to hear that guy, one of the richest guys in the world, one of the most valuable, like maybe the most valuable private companies of all time. Like nobody wants to hear that guy taking the moral high ground against one of his competitors. It's just not genuine.

Like, yeah, he should have just said, ha, that's funny. Like good thing we won't be doing it that way and just move on.

Gonto:

And that was it. But I think they did well. What I do not understand is why Claude changed the ad for the Superbowl.

Because for the Superbowl, they aired a different one. Two things that I'd say that I think were very interesting about this Superbowl year. This is the first year where I feel companies made a big splash before the Superbowl.

In the past, the Superbowl ads were, yeah.

Hank:

There was one comment on a video just while we were still talking about Sam's response. Somebody wrote this great comment on one of the Claude videos, which says the best marketing rattles your competitor into a response. And for sure, I just love that turn of phrase.

But anyways, go on. They changed the text at the Superbowl.

Gonto:

Yeah, they changed the text and they changed the video on the Superbowl, which to me was very weird, taking into account that this is, I think, the first Superbowl where there were all of the videos, all of the ads from the Superbowl were published on Twitter before. In the past, they were all news. Like, oh, let's see the ads.

It's the first time. They're fantastic. This time, most of the ads had already been seen before on Twitter and they made a huge splash on Twitter.

I think another great example of TVPN, of the Superbowl ads was TVPN, who did this TVPN ad showing the logos of everybody who went into their thing. And they had, I saw it was like millions and millions of viewers because brands were retweeting it because they were shown. But then also they were promoting TVPN who was promoting them, which I think was genius.

This idea that TVPN had on, we are going to promote the others. So they promote us, fantastic. But I did love this idea of everybody's on Twitter before and in LinkedIn sharing their videos and actually getting publicity before the event.

But I think that's mandates that you do the same video. So again, Anthropic changed it. I don't know why.

Hank:

Yeah, they soften the text a little bit. I don't remember exactly what it said, but it was.

Gonto:

Yeah, they said something like there's a different way to do ads. Like you shouldn't do it this way, but they soften it a lot.

Hank:

I don't know why. Cowards, that's why.

Gonto:

Yeah.

Hank:

I'll say here's one interesting thing that I saw a lot of people say on Twitter and elsewhere was a lot of the people in the room at the Super Bowl parties didn't get the Claudettes, you know? And it's really only the people like us who are like knee deep in tech understood, oh, that's a GPT speaking bot. Oh, which by the way, if you look at the captions on the videos, they included like some em dashes when the GPT rep was speaking, which is just like, that's a nice attention to detail.

That's awesome. But so what happened, I haven't decided if this is good or bad. So a lot of people, that ad just went over their head.

And then the tech bro in the room had to explain to everybody why it was funny, which like, I don't know if that's good or bad. It feels bad because it's maybe a little too inside jokey.

Gonto:

But I think it depends on the target because OpenAI is the B2C company. Cloud Code is more of the B2B company. And if they're more B2B and they're more techie, they are more not just developers, but techie in general B2B, I think they do well because they are going all in, in their public.

So they are not going as much into the B2C side, but rather double down on what they are really good at. And I like that a lot.

Hank:

Yeah. In contrast, OpenAI just did their, like a very like Apple-esque, like, you know, this is for the builders type of crap. Like very...

Gonto:

They also changed the video. They were going to do a teaser of the new physical device and they decided to hold on.

Hank:

That's probably wise of them.

Gonto:

They decided to hold on after the Anthropic video, which I think was wise of them. But it was interesting that they changed. And again, this is a weird new thing of changing when things show up on Twitter.

But I think it was really good for everybody because like I don't see the Super Bowl at all. Like I don't care and I wouldn't have seen the ads if they weren't on Twitter before.

Hank:

Yeah. Well, the Super Bowl is like, it's the uniquely American phenomenon, right? Like...

Yeah, I know. It's...

Gonto:

Do you watch it?

Hank:

I don't watch any football. I still put it on in the corner. I, most years I'll go to a friend's Super Bowl party or something.

Didn't work out this year. I was sick. We just stayed home and played like card games as a family on Sunday.

But it was... I still had it on in the corner. But most of the time, you know, like a lot of people are actually most interested in the ads.

So the Super Bowl gets to run extra ad breaks and they charge like $8 million a pop for those. So another one that you'd said would be interesting to talk about there was a Mr. Beast Salesforce collaboration, which Salesforce always does Super Bowl ads now. And they're...

They do? They're the epitome of B2B enterprise.

Gonto:

So two things that were interesting. This ad actually came from Twitter because Mr. Beast posted like, hey, I want to work with a brand on doing a Super Bowl ad. Like, reach out to me.

And Mark Venikoff just replied, let's do something. So I actually started on Twitter. I'm sure that he gave a discount or something like that.

But on this one for Salesforce, he did a very Mr. Beast style, calls your attention, closes the doors. There's also a contest. So now people are sharing and talking about it and people are trying to do it.

And then they learn something of Salesforce in a by the way way. I really liked that they do get more insights into the clues and work on them. They have to talk to Slack bot.

And I really like that idea because what Salesforce I think is doing a good job is they're starting with Slack, which is like your chat app. It's your AI. It's your command center for your company.

And that works for any company of any size. And then if you get hooked in into Salesforce through Slack, then eventually you can get into Salesforce and some of the other platforms that I think are even more enterprising. But they are choosing Slack on purpose I think as a way to get into any company because any company of any size could use Slack.

Hank:

Yeah. And Mr. Beast did some other like he did some like precursor videos. Each of them highlighted Slack.

Yeah. I don't know. A lot of people think Mr. Beast is a joke, but I think he's one of the like best marketers on the world right now. I mean, he gets millions of views per video, tens of millions, sometimes hundreds of millions, like to command that type of attention, you have to understand something.

Gonto:

So I'm a big fan of Mr. Beast.

Hank:

And if you contrast to, I remember Salesforce's ads from last year, it was just like, oh, a couple of celebrities like talking about what they would like, what they would wear and like totally irrelevant.

Gonto:

This was a great investment for sure. But I think now that I think about it, besides the Cloud one, I think my favorite one was the TVPN one. This idea of promote others to promote me.

I've never thought about it in this easy way, but it just increases your reach so much. Yeah, it's like the Stripe one. Remember the Stripe CD?

They did like this small CD where they were showing the logos of the companies on it. And then everybody was tweeting about it. Like, I like this framing.

And I think I'd like to see more of let's promote others so they promote us.

Hank:

Yeah. Well, I mean, that's the idea behind customer marketing and partner marketing, right?

Gonto:

Yeah, for sure. Let's switch topics a bit. Like we haven't recorded in a long time.

So we thought we had to talk a bit about OpenClaw and how to think about shamping the wave. This idea of like surfing the wave on everybody's talking about OpenClaw. OpenClaw blew up.

There was a meetup last week in SF with like three lines of like three blocks of queue. Everybody's using it. There's services now that help you install it and stuff like that.

So as a company, I haven't seen that many do a really good job of shamping into it. Do you see any? Like the only one I've seen is Lankchain that will show the tweet now.

And I actually thought that the analysis that Lankchain did on OpenClaw was kind of bad. And I think if you do an analysis that is kind of bad just to surf the wave, it's worse. Like you should actually have good stuff for it, at least in my mind, to make sense.

And I'd rather, if I don't have anything interesting to say, to say nothing better than to say something in this era of attention that is meh. Would you agree? Or would you try to comment whatever your thought is?

Hank:

Yeah, say nothing or say something bad is always an interesting choice. I usually err on the side of say nothing if you don't have something interesting or good to say. Now that doesn't mean that like, like, I mean, your company has developers.

It doesn't mean you can't be like, hey, like, you know, if your CEO has a following or you have some engineers with following or some good developer advocates, they can totally write about it, their experience with it. And if you can somehow relate it to your product, fantastic.

Gonto:

But I'll give you an example. Brain Trust is one of the companies that I work with. They do AI observability and evals.

And we're talking about can we actually do a good eval for this? And for a good eval, you need a really good data set to be able to test the input, the output, etc. We couldn't think of a really good idea.

So we said, like, we'll pass. And then we saw some other companies that do evals that had a bad take. And we thought it was worse than this.

So I think in that case, it's like, OK, to me, the exam is we have to wait and see. But if we see something, we try to come up with ideas. And if nothing comes out, then you do nothing.

But you do have people who are on guard. Like one thing we did a lot at Ziddo was we had people on guard, like literally like patient duty, but for marketing, where if something important blew up or happened, the person that was on patient duty would be like, OK, I'm stopping everything I'm doing. And for the next three days, I'll focus on this.

But then there was a minimum thing where like, OK, if we don't get something that is valuable in those two days, we just don't ship anything because we'd rather do that. And we don't feel that the time was wasted because at least we tried to do something. But I really like this idea of patient duty style for marketing.

When something comes up, it wasn't as important before. But in this current world of attention is all you need, it's the only way.

Hank:

You do need to have some terminally online people in your company to survive.

Gonto:

It's mandatory.

Hank:

I'll say like, I think at Laravel, we did OK with this wave. So we have, it's not our primary focus. Our primary focus in terms of products we're selling is Laravel Cloud, which is like fully managed infra.

But then we have this other product that we did launch last year. That's interesting, which is it's a Laravel VPS. And so one of our dev rels and our CEO put out some content about like, hey, instead of buying a Mac mini, I'm going to put my open claw on a VPS and here's how it did it.

And that was kind of interesting.

Gonto:

Our audience isn't like, for example, it's like you're not going to sell that for Laravel. So I don't think how useful it is. However, for example, Railway, who sells computers for anything, like VPS for anything, they also did like the one click deploy.

And I actually thought that they did a really good job because it's a good match for what you do. For you, it's like we have the Laravel VPS, but we want people to use Laravel. So if we do the open claw, like maybe it's good, but it's not as linked.

It's OK, it's far fetched.

Hank:

Yeah, but I think it wasn't like, it's not bad and it keeps people in a circle. I think it still is something that keeps the attention around. And trust me, our devs were doing this anyways.

So they might as well write about it.

Gonto:

Of course, I agree. I didn't install it. Did you install it too?

Did you try it or not?

Hank:

No, I don't. I don't trust that yet. That's definitely in the wait and see category.

Gonto:

I'm an early adopter. I actually did what LevelsIO said, like I got the VPS, did SSH, did tailscale and then have it there basically. Yeah, do you like it?

Is it helpful? I do have some good stuff on it. So, but I don't know.

I think there's a lot more hype than what it is right now. But that's true for everything in life, which is like don't believe all the hypers. But try to be hyping everything as a marketer.

Hank:

Hey, you know what's not hyped enough? This podcast. Why aren't you liking, subscribing and sharing this podcast right now, guys?

Come on, get us out there.

Gonto:

That was a really good hook. You should definitely follow us. And with that, I think we're done actually for today.

We're done today. We'll come back next week with some new topics too. Yeah.

Thank you for listening.