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Here's Some Bathroom Drama, Hornback Style!
Plus: Anthropic AI and more highlights from Europe
There is something very Fantasia about Hornbach’s “No Project Without Drama” from HeimatTBWA. Appropriately, it’s a one-person bathroom DIY tale, set like a pièce de théâtre. When the bathtubs multiply, we get war flashbacks to flood fiascos and magic brooms. Costuming must have been fun, and the sound is orchestrated to high effect, punctuating every abject moment with help from tragicomic masks and a kind of Greek chorus. Nietzsche would have loved it! Unlike The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, though, this story has a happy ending: a bubbly tub, just overflowy enough.
The England Cricket Board and International Cricket Council are putting millions behind the Women’s T20 World Cup next year, hoping to ignite mainstream interest. To that end, House 337 has conceived “Catch the Spirit,” which probably packs everything you’d want into a cricket ad: Earnest girl power, community cohesion and a sad man with an ice cream cone. If you’re in the U.K., expect to see this everywhere ads go these days: on TV, on VOD, out-of-home, online and with digital radio support.
We’ll wrap with “Keep Thinking.” Created by Mother London for Anthropic’s Claude AI, this work makes the case that there’s never been a better time to … have a medical condition, misunderstand stuff, have no qualifications—and on and on. The campaign is prettily produced, drawing futuristic themes into present-day reality with a deft hand.
But it smoothes over the fact that AI, as it develops, isn’t always inclined to help. It will resort to blackmail for its survival. Hallucinations—basically its tendency to lie—appear critical to how it functions, so you can’t just plug it into a medical or high-stakes professional context and assume it will just do what we deem necessary. Claude specifically has been strategic about deceit. Lastly, the idea that AI will make life better for all of us, across the board, is in and of itself a strategic deceit (albeit human).
It’s nonetheless important to educate ourselves about how the technology works and evolves. And we put this here, mainly, because we think it’s important to see how companies in this space sell themselves to mainstream markets. Onward.
Angela Natividad is the European markets editor at Muse by Clios. She also writes about gaming and fashion, and whatever else she’s interested in, really. She’s based in Paris and North Italy, so if you’re local, say hi. She might eat all your food.
