Good morning. A Super Bowl ad has turned into a temperature check on privacy and technology.

One testament to the continued relevance of Super Bowl advertising is the unpredictable fallout each year.

The latest example comes courtesy of Amazon doorbell division Ring, which used the Super Bowl on Sunday to promote a “Search Party” feature that can use AI to scan nearby outdoor cameras for customers’ lost dogs.

The ad both resonated with many consumers, tying for 10th place on the annual USA Today Ad Meter, and alarmed others over the privacy implications.

“No One, Including Our Furry Friends, Will Be Safer in Ring’s Surveillance Nightmare,” was the headline on a response by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which cited concerns including Ring’s partnership with police tech provider Flock Safety.

Privacy advocates scheduled a protest outside Amazon headquarters in Seattle on Friday seeking to end its ties with Flock, ICE and Customs and Border Protection.

Now the deal with Flock, which Ring announced last October, is off.

Ring’s blog post didn’t mention the pressure of the past week.

“Following a comprehensive review, we determined the planned Flock Safety integration would require significantly more time and resources than anticipated,” Ring said.

“Our mission has always been to make neighborhoods safer,” it added. “That mission comes with significant responsibility—to our customers, to the communities we serve, and to the trust you place in our products and features.”

The intelligence unit of WPP agency VML yesterday released its latest annual Future 100 report on evolving consumer sentiments and behaviors, the WSJ Leadership Institute’s Katie Deighton writes for the newsletter.

VML’s report, drawn from surveys of nearly 16,000 adults across 16 countries and presented to an audience at WPP’s New York office, described a host of overlapping phenomena including:

• Algospeak: The lexicon of words elevated by social media and AI culture. “Unalive” percolated online as people tried to dodge algorithms’ restrictions against terms like “die” and “kill,” for example, while greater use of “meticulous” and “garner” in conversations and on podcasts seems to reflect large language models’ favored turns of phrase.
  
  Brands need to understand the forces shaping language to avoid controversy or miscommunication with consumers, the report said.
   
• Dysoptimism: A prevailing feeling among respondents that acknowledges darkness but refuses despair. “Navigating it will require strength, malleability, and also something softer: the small, uplifting rewards that help us withstand turbulent times,” according to VML.
   
• Treatonomics: The economy of spending on the aforementioned small splurges. Some 30% of Gen Z say they are spending more on little treats, compared with 14% of Gen Xers, according to the report.
   
• Jellycatification: A subset of treatonomics, originally coined by the South China Morning Post, that describes how companies from luxury fashion houses to candy brands have introduced cutesy collectibles reminiscent of Jellycat, the British soft toy company.
   
• Entropism: An aesthetic that elevates dirt and decay over the clean and polished. [See also: apocalyptic glamor, a new aesthetic drawing on warrior queens and dystopian survivors that is less about conventional prettiness and more about endurance.]
   
• Joyspan: A term coined by gerontologist Dr. Kerry Burnight to bring quality of life into discussions of longevity. “The old question was how not to age,” she wrote in 2025. “The new question is how to age with strength, vitality, purpose, meaning, and, frankly, joy.”

The Future 100 report also spotlights “resilience wellness,” which it describes as a kind of body-and-mind disaster prep replacing go bags and backyard bunkers with personal strength, flexibility and purpose.

Some companies and executives treat such health as a competitive advantage, leading to programs such as this one in the report:

Executive resilience also featured on stage at this week’s WSJ Tech Council Summit, where Chris Jordan, a former military exercise physiologist who spent 20 years with the Johnson & Johnson Human Performance Institute, described one aspect this way:

Marketers famously don’t have a ton of longevity in any given CMO role, but marketing careers are long. Resilience can make them longer.

You can see the full conversation on a “resilience layer” for leadership with Chris Jordan and the WSJ Leadership Institute’s Gwendolyn Bounds and Alan Murray right here.

And check out these clips from other sessions at the summit:

Resilient product: Former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal reflects on the social-media platform’s legacy, saying it’s “special to have built something that is resilient beyond yourself.”

Cost per outcome: Echoing certain predictions for the ad agency model in the age of AI, Sierra co-founder and CEO Bret Taylor predicts that software billing will move from monthly fees to charges only when an AI agent completes a job or closes a sale.

Why AI adoption is moving in “dog years”: BNY CIO Leigh-Ann Russell and Sonic Automotive CTO Stephen Carvelli discuss the rapid pace of innovation and the move toward customer-facing AI agents.

The community where marketing leaders drop the corporate speak and share what’s actually happening. The WSJ CMO Council unites leaders from the world’s most influential brands including Adobe, Audi, Google, IBM, Intel, Johnson & Johnson, Meta, Taco Bell, P&G and Verizon.

Tap into the connections and WSJ intelligence that move careers forward and separate the prepared from the scrambling.

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Everyone watching the Olympics is buzzing about the $150,000 flying robots capturing athletes at close range while they execute terrifying feats of winter athleticism. [WSJ] 

How the Super Bowl has turned into an enormous, IRL moment for online creators. [Digiday]

From Pizza Hut to Titan Caskets, here’s how brands are trying to take advantage of Valentine’s Day spending. [Ad Age]

Dentsu Group’s president and global CEO will resign next month as the ad holding company revamps its leadership team. [Adweek]

Taylor Swift asked the government to prevent a bedding company from trademarketing “Swift Home,” saying that its cursive branding too closely resembles her signature. [Newsweek]

Keith McNally’s brasserie Balthazar is hosting a monthlong promotion for French fashion label Ami Paris that includes “branded eats.” [High Snobiety]

Purely Elizabeth has introduced a “beauty-focused granola” with collagen peptides and biotin. [Glossy]