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Welcome Back to TWISM’s Autopsy Series!
In this series, we examine the biggest actual marketing deaths worldwide. While others made expensive mistakes, you, along with 70,000+ professional TWISM readers, are learning from their failures for free.
Keep in mind that these weekly autopsies could save your career.
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🔬 The Main Autopsy: Google’s “Gemini” Super Bowl Cheese Hallucination
Brand: Google LLC.
Campaign: “50 States, 50 Stories” Gemini Super Bowl campaign.
Budget: ~$8 million for a 30-second Super Bowl spot.
Cause of Death: A factual “AI assist” (Gouda dominates the planet) that collapsed under basic public scrutiny.
Time of Death: February 6, 2025
What They Intended
Google wanted to sell Gemini as a safe, practical productivity boost by showcasing small businesses using it to write marketing copy and product descriptions. The message was simple: AI helps real people do real work, faster.
What Actually Happened
A Wisconsin spot included Gemini-generated copy claiming Gouda accounts for “50% to 60% of the world’s cheese consumption.”
The claim was publicly flagged and mocked, turning the campaign into a meme about AI confidently making things up.
Google edited the ad to remove the statistic and replaced it with a safer line (Gouda is “one of the most popular cheeses in the world”).
The Wisconsin Cheese Mart page also removed the same line, reinforcing that the “AI output” was not just a video prop, it was tied to real brand copy.
Google’s defense still leaned on “this appears on the web,” which is basically saying: the coroner found the toxin in multiple dumpsters.
The Numbers
50 states, meaning the campaign scaled the risk surface by design.
“50% to 60%”, the precise claim that made the lie look “sourced.”
~$8M for a 30-second slot, the price of doing surgery on national television.
Super Bowl date: February 9, 2025, meaning the controversy hit in the highest stakes pre-game window.
Editing of the ad confirmed: an implicit admission that “web grounded” is not “truth grounded.”
Expert pushback (Cornell’s Andrew Novakovic), because the internet will always find a professor when you need a reality check.
Timeline of Destruction
January 29, 2025: Super Bowl ad slots reported around $8M, stakes established.
Early February 2025: “50 States, 50 Stories” spots circulate online ahead of the game.
February 6, 2025: Google edits the ad after the Gouda claim is flagged.
February 7, 2025: Trade press frames it as another AI accuracy stumble in advertising.
February 9, 2025: Wider outlets amplify the story and the correction.
February 2025 follow-up: The revised copy becomes the canonical version, but the screenshot receipts live forever.
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🧬 Failure DNA Analysis
The Root Cause: Automation Bias in a White Coat
Cognitive Bias #1: Automation Bias
When people over-trust machine output, especially when it arrives formatted like “professional copy.” That is exactly what happened when a confident statistic made it into a public-facing creative.
Cognitive Bias #2: Authority Bias
The Super Bowl is a cultural authority. Put a claim in that setting, and audiences assume someone checked it. When the claim is wrong, the embarrassment scales with the stage.
Warning Signs They Ignored:
“It’s on multiple websites” is not a verification method.
If your hero product is “writing,” the failure mode is “lying,” not “typos.”
Disclaimers do not stop screenshots.
Scaling to 50 variants multiplies the chance that one of them contains a landmine.
Why Smart People Made This Dumb Decision:
Because “grounded in web content” sounds like “fact checked,” and the human brain loves a shortcut that lets it ship faster. The campaign’s medical error was treating popularity on the internet as clinical evidence.
🎭 Myth Busted: “If it’s grounded in the web, it’s safe for brand copy.”
The Myth:
If an AI system pulls from the internet, it won’t hallucinate in public.
The Reality:
The web contains SEO sludge, recycled myths, and confidently wrong stats. “Grounded” can still mean “grounded in garbage,” and this campaign proved it.
Data Points:
78% of organizations reported using AI in 2024, which means this failure mode is now a mass exposure issue.
Over 40% of agentic AI projects are expected to be canceled by 2027 (per Gartner), often because reality does not match the demo.
Even leading AI research teams acknowledge hallucination as a core reliability challenge driven by training incentives that reward guessing.
Why This Myth Persists:
Because speed feels like competence, and because most teams do not have an internal “facts lab” for marketing copy. Also, nothing gets approved faster than “the model said so.”
What to Do Instead:
Use AI for drafts and structure, but build a mandatory verification layer for any claim containing numbers, rankings, “most,” “best,” “percent,” or “world.” This is not anti-AI. It is an antiseptic technique.
🛡️ Failure Prevention Toolkit: The “AI Copy Sterilization Checklist”
Before you publish AI-assisted marketing copy:
✓ Claims Triage
Highlight every number, percentage, ranking, and superlative.
Flag any claim that implies global scale (world, most, largest).
Treat those lines as “high-risk tissue.”
✓ Verification Protocol
Require two independent sources for any numeric claim, not “two blogs repeating the same line.”
Prefer primary data, trade associations, regulators, or academic references.
If you cannot verify it, replace it with a non-numeric phrasing.
✓ Human in the Loop, Not Human in the Credits
Assign a named reviewer responsible for factual integrity.
Give them the authority to veto copy, even if the creative is locked.
Do a final read in the exact channel it will appear (TV, YouTube, TikTok captions).
✓ Scale Safeguards
If you are producing many variants (states, regions, languages), audit a statistically meaningful sample before launch.
Add automated detection for risky patterns (percent, top, most, only).
Maintain a rapid correction plan with pre-approved edits.
Red Flags to Watch For:
“I saw it on multiple sites” is the only justification.
Copy that sounds too specific to be true.
Disclaimers are used as a substitute for fact-checking.
A launch plan that assumes the internet will be kind.
Screenshots save careers. Which failure lesson are you bookmarking?
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That’s all for today. Thanks for reading. Now…
Go BIG or go home!
~ Josh from “This Week in Social Media”
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