☕ Are we human?
Humanity is taking a front seat in advertising.
Marketing Brew <[email protected]>
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Morning Brew promotes a discussion on human-centric brand strategy, highlighting ads from Meta, Anthropic, and other companies that focus on humanity and optimism amidst growing concerns about AI's negative effects. The brand showcases various ads that pose existential questions and offer soothing messages. Morning Brew explores this trend in advertising.
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591 words · about 2 min to read
September 08, 2026
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Sponsor Logo: impact.com
It’s Tuesday. Wing, stop: After 12 years, creator Amelia Dimoldenberg’s popular YouTube series Chicken Shop Date, which served as a popular promotional stop for actors, musicians, and other celebrities, will come to an end.
In today’s edition:
Identity shifts 🫶
All grown up 📺
—Kristina Monllos, Jennimai Nguyen
BRAND STRATEGY
Human-centric
Collage of screenshots from ads, clockwise from top left: From a Meta ad, a woman smiling lying down as viewed from above, with copy across her face that reads
“What if we started to be more human again?”
A voice poses that question near the end of “Hope in Hard Questions,” a 90-second ad for Anthropic’s Claude. The spot, which debuted earlier this summer, moves through existential quandaries like, “Can AI be trusted?” and “If it ends up taking, like, almost all the jobs, then what does it mean to work?” before taking a more optimistic tone.
In late July, Meta also used techno-optimism in a new ad called “The Future is For Everyone,” albeit set to a song about the apocalypse. During the 60-second spot, an unseen narrator says Meta is “doubling down” on people “because while technology will change, our intention behind it never will.”
It’s perhaps not surprising that massive tech companies are trying to soothe the growing concerns about the negative effects of AI. Cratering public sentiment, especially when it comes to data centers, has inspired recent protests. And when there’s an image problem, after all, it’s marketing’s job to fix it.
But tech companies aren’t alone in putting humanity front and center in advertising messages. Even more comical ads, like Garage Beer and Liquid Death’s recent 90-second musical satire telling audiences to send in their urine to cool off AI data centers, position the move as a way to “save humanity.”
The message that a brand is made by and for humans and will benefit human consumers in some way is not often something that brands have historically been compelled to spell out so explicitly. Marketing experts told us the shift to more overt references to humanity is a reflection of the zeitgeist as the rapid push toward AI adoption and narratives around the tech’s inevitability have led to larger, more existential questions.
“We’re in a cultural moment where it feels like we are not in control,” Megha Parikh, executive strategy director at VML, told us. That reality, she continued, means humanity is “a very powerful message to empower people…You are in charge of your own destiny. I think that’s a really powerful cultural tension that’s playing out in ad land.”
Continue reading here.—KM
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