Of Dave Lee

If you are a technology company not called Apple, attracting the public’s interest in the release of your new smartphone is a challenge. Your executives, which must be involved, are conservative, rigid and, most of the time, white and elderly. Even worse, it’s not famous.

So what are you doing? If you are Google, the answer is obviously: everything. On Wednesday, to promote the new series of Pixels with artificial intelligence, Alphabet’s unit certainly broke the record for celebrities and influencers in just one hour. This is expected to become the rule, as conservative technology companies are struggling to explain their artificial intelligence products to an increasingly thoughtful audience.

This is the other side of the struggle for artificial intelligence: the attempt to gain the attention of those who do not passionately monitor technology news, to explain to them what artificial intelligence really does and why it is worth paying for it. If these tools are going to be worth the cost of their growth, everyone should be used, from your little brother to your grandmother. In the case of Google, the project is two difficult: it must persuade people to change their iPhones with the very capable but comparatively non -popular pixel.

To do this, Google invited The Tonight Show presenter Jimmy Fallon, who interviewed Google’s executive director Rick Osterloh (with television submitters behind their shoulders) and then discussed with Adrienne Loffon, head of the world.

Google has asked the Formula 1 Lando Norris driver to shoot an advertising video with basketball star Yiannis Antetokounbos to promote the use of artificial intelligence to learn a new sport. He hired Alex Cooper, a Call Her Daddy presenter, the most famous podcaster you can close without provoking reactions to present the camera with the help of artificial intelligence. Photographer Andre D. Wagner, based in Brooklyn, was paid to take and take photos with the new Pixel camera to show her performance in low light conditions.

The Mexican Influencer of Social Media and musician Karen Polinesia was used to present live translation tools. Kareem Rahma, presenter of the video series Subwaytakes on social media, returned a version of his show in which the “zoom” was that the new google headphones are great. For fitness, Google invited Cody Rigsby, one of Peloton’s trainers who have gained fanatics.

Another basketball star, Stephen Curry of Golden State Warriors, appeared in video to promote Google’s new AI Performance Coach. Ah, and Jonas Brothers were paid to use Pixel to record their latest music video.

Celebrities are not something new, of course, and you could say that many of those involved are not so famous, at least not for you (or for me, honestly). But celebrities nowadays do not work as before. You can no longer hire some stars, put them to drink pepsi and get into most houses in the world.

The goal of the Google artificial intelligence team, like any marketing team, is to enter online communities, some of which are extremely specialized to promote artificial intelligence.

The problem with all these appearances, of course, is authenticity, or its lack. Few will really believe that Steph Curry is turning to Google for help to become a better player. And you certainly can’t convince me that the guy from Subwaytakes really believes that Google headphones, which require you to shake your head to answer a call, is at all fine.

Show me the next photo of Jimmy Fallon looking at his smartphone and I bet you are iPhone. (Tim Cook was a guest on Fallon’s show.) Seeing the composition of the guests at the Google event, I remembered the famous tweet by singer Alicia Keys since 2013, who had just been announced as “World Creative Director” of Blackberry. Underneath her post promoting the company there were the words: “Sending via twitter for iPhone”.

The Influencer has become smarter than then: He knows when his favorite creators are honest. However, as I write this article, the projections for the Google presentation on YouTube were 5 million. This, and the publicity that follows, can be money spent correctly. The needle can move and Google’s artificial intelligence functions can attract a new and important audience.

Or perhaps consumers see it as yet another proof of the seemingly unlimited budget to promote artificial intelligence as quickly as possible, using every possible trick.