Nostalgia as product strategy
The emotional design behind the latest AI marketing campaigns.
If you haven’t seen them yet, OpenAI’s launched new ad campaign of short 30 seconds videos that embed AI into an idealised, warmly analog, version of the past. They’re quite visually pleasing, to be honest, with a slight VHS grain and muted colours, and depict very relatable everyday scenarios like wanting to impress a girl or getting fitter. They lean hard on 80s soundtracks and cheesy movie vibes.
https://medium.com/media/0d86806a1b53574a4a86e2d031e2d4a0/href
As of a few days ago, Anthropic is holding a short residency at Air Mail, a brick-and-mortar, mid-century inspired newsstand in the West Village of New York where they are giving away copies of Dario Amodei’s (Anthropic’s CEO) book and “thinking” caps (I’m actually a sucker for a cheesy pun so they got me with that one, I’ll admit) while sipping on coffee and allegedly chatting with employees.
In what could seem like a curious twist, the latest wave of AI marketing feels more retro than futuristic, and very intentionally aimed at building an emotional narrative to position AI as a trustworthy, almost intimate, infrastructure rather than disruptive technology.
But why do such “futuristic” products need to resort to analog human connection, local business aesthetics, and pre-digital social patterns for their marketing?
The answer lies in emotional design — not the delightful micro-interactions kind, but the more strategic one that shapes how people feel about risk in novelty, and trust.
The problem with disruption
For two decades, tech companies have sold progress as inevitable, but a series of high-profile failures (Theranos, Crypto/Web3 to name a few) have made people suspicious of “disruptive” and “revolutionary” products.
And with that, comes also a design problem: the visual language of innovation — clean whites, minimalist, buzzwords like ‘seamless’ and ‘frictionless’—is not so much a plus that can be leveraged anymore.
OpenAI and Anthropic launched their nostalgic marketing after this shift, so they’re being careful not to lead with “AGI will transform everything” (when it comes to global campaigns, at least) because outside Silicon Valley that language can triggers resistance, or at the very least raise eyebrows.
Neither company is selling us the future directly with these campaigns, but rather they’re selling us a memory of trust and embedding their product inside it: OpenAI reaches for comfort, essentially framing ChatGPT as a friendly kitchen appliance, in an 80s slice-of-life of pre-internet innocence, and Anthropic reaches for community and “third place” culture (interestingly also a term coined in the 80s) of coffee shops and neighbourhood hubs.
All pretty incongruous coming from big tech companies building the next phase of automation.
Why nostalgia works
This paradox of how the future is selling itself as the past, is what really caught my eye and got me thinking. Emotional design is used to manufacture feelings that rational arguments can’t create: in other forums, both companies are talking about the speed and disruption they’re bringing, but here they use storytelling to make their technology feel human again.
This is not new, nostalgia is often used in marketing to reduce uncertainty. By tapping into the retro aesthetic or a simple get-a-coffee-and-hat hangout, what they’re trying to tell their audience is that this new thing won’t hurt you, ironically framing themselves as continuity of something rather than the disruptors they are aiming and claiming to be.
From a psychological perspective, this is pretty textbook — two reasons come to mind, and they’re both about how nostalgia restructures information processing.
Schema theory
In psychology, schema theory is a cognitive framework that explains how our brain stores templates — mental blueprints, if you will — for how things usually work.
When we see or hear something new, our mind compares it to these templates to make sense of it quickly.
For example, we all have a ‘chat schema’ (type question → get response → continue conversation). When ChatGPT launched, it was easily understandable by millions partly because the interface is based on every messaging app they’ve ever used.
In design or storytelling, using familiar patterns activates existing schemas, so people understand and trust new things faster because they fit into what already feels known.
In other words, these marketing plays tap into familiar schemas to encode AI into accessible narratives. They’re not focusing on how we can use this technology to break new grounds as much as how we can embed it into what we might already be doing — whether by being a training partner or a ‘thinking cap’ for everyday problems.
Temporal framing
Going for an 80s theme and a brick and mortar hipster hang, also triggers nostalgia in the more literal sense, and therefore a sense of comfort that can misdirect present concerns, or just inhibit (temporarily?) those thoughts on how much positive vs negative this technology has brought into society in the last couple years.
Nostalgia collapses time — the 80s don’t feel like 40 years ago, they feel like yesterday (especially to the more resistant older generation) and when the past feels close, the future feels less threatening.
This allows nostalgia to become a trust-building device that can lead even the skeptics or those on the fence to feel a spark of curiosity towards AI and therefore potentially convert them to users.
The real competition
This is where emotional design becomes competitive strategy: once nostalgia lowers our guard, emotional differentiation becomes the real battleground.
Both companies are selling functionally similar products: large language models that generate text (marginal differences do exist but arguably they’re only apparent to “power users” that may have interacted with both enough to notice those slight variation in response style or context handling). And in this case, making us feel something about one product or the other, becomes the differentiator instead of any demonstrable superiority.
OpenAI’s 80s nostalgia and Anthropic’s hipster warmth create distinct emotional profiles that different people might resonate with, but neither corresponds to actual measurable product advantage.
Whether either campaign addresses actual user needs or showcases the real benefit of this tech is debatable, but then again AI is such an “abstract” concept for most that how do you really condense it down in a 30 second ad or how do you make an event out of it where people just show up?
Paradoxically, to give shape in people’s mind to such a frictionless digital experience, tactility and emotional texture are essential. Once again, humanising technology, making it feel friendly and approachable through design, allow emotions to be much more effective compared to simple information to drive technology adoption.
In fact, both campaigns operate as acts of emotional design at its finest, by leveraging familiarity, tactility, and emotional tone to shift how we perceive risk.
The grain of VHS or just hanging out in a third place become a proxy for trust — material cues designed to stand in for ethical assurances that the average user might need.
For designers, this raises questions about our role: are we building trust or manufacturing it? These campaigns show that emotional design isn’t always simply about delight but it can guide trust calibration too. And maybe that’s the new design challenge for us in these new AI dominant times: ensuring that human-feeling design reflects human values too.
Nostalgia as product strategy was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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