Wyze Mocks Ring as Super Bowl Ad Fallout Continues
Amazon’s Super Bowl LX ad for Ring doorbell cameras did not go well. It used the most expensive advertising slot in the world to promote “Search Party,” a feature ostensibly to find missing dogs. But that’s not how it was perceived by viewers.
The fallout has been severe: Ring canceled its partnership with Flock Safety in the wake of the Super Bowl ad. The association was already controversial because of Flock’s reported ties to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), something that Flock denies.
“Following a comprehensive review, we determined the planned Flock Safety integration would require significantly more time and resources than anticipated,” Ring says in a statement. “We therefore made the joint decision to cancel the integration and continue with our current partners … The integration never launched, so no Ring customer videos were ever sent to Flock Safety.”
After the Super Bowl ad aired, concerns over Ring partnering with Flock once again resurfaced. And amid tensions in Minnesota, including viral online posts accusing Ring of working with ICE, users began returning their doorbell cameras. Ring clearly felt it had to act.
“Ring has no partnership with ICE, does not give ICE videos, feeds, or back-end access, and does not share video with them,” a Ring spokesperson tells CNN.
Rival home camera company Wyze wasted no time in gleefully mocking its more established rivals; Wyze is a startup founded by ex-Amazon employees.
In Wyze’s parody, the company mocks the entire premise of Ring’s Super Bowl ad: “The way in which we search for missing dogs hasn’t changed in years,” the commercial says. Wyze points to Apple Tags, microchips, and social media as just some of the ways it has changed.
“What if we could make finding one lost dog require the computational power of a small, dictator-led nation state,” says the Wyze ad. “We could find literally anyone, but we only use this technology to find lost dogs.”
Ring is likely regretting its Super Bowl ad now. Futurism compared it to the infamous 2017 Pepsi ad featuring Kendall Jenner handing a police officer a can of soda amid Black Lives Matter protests.
“I think (the commercial) surprised a lot of Americans by revealing just how powerful surveillance networks backed by AI have become,” ACLU senior policy analyst Jay Stanley tells USA Today. “That power may be applied to puppies today, but where else might it be applied? Searches for people wearing t-shirts with certain political messages on them?”
Image credits: Ring