The AI Companies Know Something Wall Street Doesn't

Advertising holding company share prices took a hammering last week. Omnicom fell over 11%. Publicis dropped 9%. WPP lost nearly 12%. The narrative: AI is coming for the agency model. Anthropic launched Claude Cowork, investors panicked.

Meanwhile, at the Super Bowl on Sunday, the biggest advertising category wasn't beer. It wasn't auto. It was AI. Seven AI companies bought Super Bowl ads. More than beer and auto combined. Anthropic's Claude ad was measured as the single most effective spot of the entire broadcast - generating 9.1x more consumer engagement than the median ad.

The companies building the tools that Wall Street thinks will kill advertising just spent $8–10 million per 30-second slot on broadcast television. They chose one of the most traditional mass-reach mediums available. Not programmatic. Not social. Not their own platforms. They went with linear TV.

And here's the punchline. Anthropic's Super Bowl ad - the single most effective spot of the entire broadcast - was a pledge that Claude products will remain ad-free. They spent $10 million on television to tell the world they won't run ads on their own platform. The company at the centre of the "AI will kill agencies" panic chose broadcast TV over its own product to build its brand. If that doesn't tell you everything you need to know about where brand building actually happens, I don't know what does.

125 million people watched, a 79 share. You cannot buy that anywhere else and Anthropic’s marketing team knew this.

Amazon - the world's largest advertiser - figured this out years ago. A company that owns one of the biggest digital advertising platforms on earth continues to commit a significant budget to offline. Thursday Night Football. Broadcast sponsorships. TV campaigns. Amazon has more data on consumer behaviour than almost anyone. Anthropic is following in Amazon's footsteps.

I use Claude. It's genuinely useful – it sense checks these articles before I publish. But when I saw the Thrad article about WPP's share price and the "AI panic," I commented with a simple question: How does Claude Cowork do media planning?

The answer is: it doesn't. It can’t. Not without proprietary datasets that media planning requires. The data will never be given directly to an LLM like Claude.

Wall Street is pricing in a future where AI replaces media agencies. The AI companies are doing the opposite - broadcast media, creative storytelling, and mass reach still work for building a brand.

Someone's wrong. I'd bet on Silicon Valley, not Wall Street this time. And I wouldn't count the holding companies out either - they've survived bigger disruptions than this.