I plopped onto my couch this morning and ripped open the latest New Yorker. I skipped the first few pages by instinct — after all, they’re just ads. “Except,” I said to myself, “that’s kind of my job?”
So I flipped back to page one.
What I saw was a two-page ad for AI company Anthropic, which makes Claude, a ChatGPT competitor.
The Claude logo took up the entire left page.
On the right page, the headline read, “Late bloomer” (including the quotes).
The body copy then went on to say that Claude might not be the first AI chatbot to market. But this was by design, the ad explained, so Claude could be so good, and so safe, and so useful as it happens to be. “We build AI you can trust,” concluded the copy
In a way, this kinda sounded like the famous Avis ad, “Avis is only No. 2,” which turned being second in a market into an advantage.
Or maybe it kinda sounded like the famous Volkswagen “Lemon” ad, which flipped quality concerns into a demonstration of higher standards.
The Anthropic ad kinda sounded like that… but it failed.
Because those headlines — “Avis is only No.2,” “Lemon” — really were objections that people were throwing at Avis and Volkswagen.
Whoever wrote this ad for Anthropic could have gone that same route by saying something like “Also-ran” in the headline.
Instead, they went the board-pleasing “Late bloomer” route, which is not any kind of insult or objection, but in fact a kind of smug self-compliment.
I can’t say whether this Anthropic ad will prove to be effective in any way, and neither can Anthropic. Because this ad is a typical “tombstone ad,” with no mechanism to track response.
All I can tell you is that this headline + body copy violate a kind of core rule of effective communication.
That rule is contrast.
If you say about a person that he is smug yet effective, then there is some tension and power in that description, because of the contrast. Plus, you get bonus points for transparency.
On the other hand, if you describe someone as “smug, yet falsely modest,” then at best you’ll confuse your audience based on what they were expecting. At worst, you’ll sound repetitive, mealy-mouthed, or self-serving, which is what I felt about this Anthropic ad.
So use contrast for power. Avoid contrast for blandness.
Also, if you haven’t done so yet, consider reading my 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters. It doesn’t have anything to do with this email, and so I won’t pretend otherwise. The only thing I will say in favor of this book is that it’s short yet cheap. For more info: