The Mistake Brands Make When They Try to Be Relatable

Hey Beyonder!

I watched the Google Gemini ad during the Olympics last year and had a weird feeling I couldn't shake.

You might have seen it.

A dad sits down to help his daughter write a letter to her sports idol, Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone. Sweet premise. The daughter is in awe of this woman. She wants to reach out but doesn't know how.

So dad opens Gemini and asks the AI to write the letter for her.

The ad plays it like a heartwarming moment. Like technology bringing people closer.

But something felt off. And apparently I wasn't the only one.

What People Actually Felt

The comments were not kind.

The letter wasn't meant to be well-written.

It was meant to be hers.

Clumsy and nervous and genuine, the way a starstruck kid actually writes to someone they admire.

The AI made it polished. And polished was the wrong thing to be.

The Claim That Backfired

Google's pitch was: AI helps you connect.

What viewers heard was: AI connects for you.

Those are not the same thing. And people felt the difference immediately.

When you use technology to do the emotional heavy lifting, you don't get credit for the emotion. You actually lose it. The letter stops being a message from a daughter and becomes a product. Something generated. Something that could've been written for anyone.

The Mistake Underneath The Mistake

Google wasn't wrong that AI can help people express themselves.

That's actually a decent insight.

The problem was the example they chose to prove it.

A child writing to her hero is one of the most purely human things that exists. It's the wrong place to put AI in the story.

When you try to demonstrate your product's value by solving a problem that didn't exist, people don't see the solution. They see the intrusion.

Try This

Think about how you talk about what you do: your product, your service, your content.

Ask yourself: in my story, who actually does the meaningful thing? Me or my tool?

If it's the tool, flip it. Put the human back at the center and let the tool be the thing that made it easier.

That's the story people want to believe.

Final Thought

Google pulled the ad and quietly moved on. They just started telling different stories: ones about productivity, about tasks, about things AI is genuinely good at.

That was the right call.

Because the lesson wasn't that AI shouldn't be in advertising. It's that AI shouldn't be cast as the one doing the feeling.

Emotion has to come from a person. The moment it doesn't, your audience knows. And they don't forgive it easily.

Keep telling stories,

Epaphra