Good morning. Today, ad blindness is back in an unexpected place.

OpenAI has emphasized that the ads it’s now testing won’t influence your conversations with ChatGPT.

But what if you ask the bot?

ChatGPT won’t actually “know” that you’ve been served an ad unless you point it out, OpenAI CEO of Applications Fidji Simo said in a new interview on “Access,” the tech podcast co-hosted by Alex Heath and Ellis Hamburger.

If you do bring it up, ChatGPT will explain its intentional ad blindness and offer users a button that lifts the veil, according to Simo.

The UX design is meant to tell a reassuring story. 

“That reinforces to people, ‘Oh, by default the model is not seeing that,’” Simo said.

Here’s the next wrinkle: Once you get the model to notice the ads, you can get its “neutral” take on them, Simo explained:

Some brands will get “spooked” by that prospect, she said, “but I also think we live in a world where transparency and authenticity are what count.”

I’ll stipulate to that, as well as to a company’s need to pay the (staggering, historic, check-out-this-chart) bills.

But it’s easy to see how ads create commercial incentives.

OpenAI may studiously ignore the financial pull. But it will certainly be aware that some advertisers might spend more if ChatGPT was just a little less likely to call their ads “actually not really good.”

TV’s biggest night wasn’t quite as big as last year, but it was close.

Around 124.9 million people watched Super Bowl LX on Sunday, according to data from Nielsen, down slightly from the record 126 million who watched last year’s game.

No complaints: Marketers typically get no ratings guarantees for their Super Bowl ad buys. The latest game also still goes down as the second-most watched Super Bowl of all time. And everybody who pre-released their commercials piled up views even before the Patriots won the coin toss.

Halftime score: Bad Bunny’s much-anticipated halftime show averaged 128.2 million viewers, Joe Flint writes in his ratings report for The Wall Street Journal.

The alternative halftime show from Turning Point USA featuring Kid Rock received just over 6 million concurrent streams on YouTube.

Zarin said on Instagram that a Spanish-language Super Bowl concert was inappropriate during the country’s 250th anniversary and that it got political by including “literally no white people in the entire thing.”

Some “Real Housewives” cast members and fans criticized her comments, while former family business Zarin Fabrics said on Instagram that it hasn’t had an association with her for several years.

Zarin said producers didn’t give her a chance to defend herself. “I took it down right away,” she told In Touch. “People make mistakes. I’m human.”

Two big toymakers reported very different holiday experiences, extending the muddled trail of tea leaves available to read for consumer insights.

Mattel said an anticipated surge in holiday sales came up short, prompting the Barbie and Hot Wheels maker to step up discounts. The company raised prices last summer in response to tariffs.

Rival Hasbro hours earlier said shoppers had been willing to pay higher prices for its toys during the holiday season, letting it pass along tariff costs without significantly hurting demand.

Other bets: This year will be a big one for Mattel’s project to build businesses beyond the strict confines of the toy aisle, with an expanded push into mobile games and its first live-action movies since “Barbie.”

June will bring “Masters of the Universe” with Jared Leto as Skeletor, followed by “Matchbox: The Movie” starring John Cena.

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An activist investor has built a roughly $200 million stake in Warner Bros. Discovery and plans to oppose the company’s deal with Netflix. [WSJ] 

Paramount aims to expand its Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle business with new toys, themed pizzerias and “Teeny Mutant Ninja Turtles,” a YouTube series with episodes four minutes long. [THR] 

Viewers want to see celebrities in their Super Bowl ads, but clarity is what turned out to make a mark on AI bots like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. [Adweek] 

AI models increasingly crawl publishers’ sites for information and training despite attempts at countermeasures. [Digiday]

Boston Beer Co. CMO Lesya Lysyj is ending a seven-year stint with the brewer, which has said it needs to get back to “growth mode.” [Ad Age] 

There’s a new beverage trend popping up at restaurants and bars: fluffy juice. [VinePair]