Alexa Super Bowl 2021

Amazon Turns Michael B. Jordan Into an Alexa Device for Super Bowl Ad

Michael B. Jordan is Amazon’s latest Alexa-enabled device in a teaser for Amazon’s Super Bowl ad slated to debut this coming Sunday. The spot features a woman’s fantasy of the “Black Panther” star as a home for the voice assistant and her significant other’s subsequent panic.

Beautiful Vessel

The ad is for the new, spherical Amazon Echo smart speaker and begins with an admiring crowd around one of the devices. In the segment Amazon is using as a preview of the full ad, a woman comments that the smart speaker is “flawless” and that she “literally couldn’t imagine a more beautiful vessel for Alexa to be inside,” but trails off as she a bus outside with Jordan’s face promoting his new movie “Without Remorse,” aptly set to be released by Amazon Studios this year.

The ad clip then turns into an imagined experience of Jordan as Alexa, answering cooking questions, turning on sprinklers that soak him in water. She then sits with friends and asks Alexa to dim the lights, which somehow translates to Jordan taking off his shirt while the women sit, rapt. Her husband then shouts “lights on” from outside the frame. The fantasy concludes with her asking Alexa to read her an audiobook, which in her mind has Jordan sitting, fully dressed, in a tub with her reciting lines from a book while her husband knocks on the bathroom door. The full ad will run during the Super Bowl on Sunday between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

Intimate Alexa

The ad clip is a cute way to illustrate some of what Alexa can do while also promoting another Amazon product. It is also a notably more subdued ad compared to last year’s Super Bowl submission by Amazon. For 2020, Amazon did a whole elaborate series of ads imagining history if Alexa had been there, with big historical set pieces and lots of people dressed in period costumes. The ad’s intimacy may be purely a creative choice, but it could partially because of the limited number of people who should share space during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. In that case, the Google Assistant ad from last year, which was only visuals with voiceovers, would be a perfect pandemic ad. One notable takeaway, if Amazon’s ad is accurate, suggests who many people might want Amazon to pick as its next celebrity voice after Samuel L. Jackson.

  

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