Meta released a new AI-focused brand ad Thursday on its official Instagram account, framing artificial intelligence as a force for human connection rather than displacement. The pitch was warm, the visuals wholesome — toddlers, laughing parents, Jalen Brunson waving at the Knicks Championship Parade. The soundtrack, however, was a 1972 David Bowie track about the apocalypse.

The Song Choice Nobody Can Quite Explain

"Five Years" — the opening track from Bowie's The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust — describes a dying Earth with five years left, followed by panic, violence, and desperate attempts at redemption. The ad lifts a middle section about human connection and crowds, neatly sidestepping the opener: "News had just come over / We had five years left to cry in / News guy wept and told us / Earth was really dying."

When WIRED reached out, Meta spokesperson Francis Brennan defended the choice by surfacing a 1972 Bowie quote sourced from BowieBible.com:

"People are so incredibly serious and scared of the future that I would wish to turn the feeling the other way, into a wave of optimism. If one can take the micky out of the future... It's going to be unbelievably technological."

That same BowieBible.com, however, also quotes drummer Mick Woodmansey from a 2018 interview: "We knew it was about the end of the world and pretty depressing. I remember when we recorded it, he was actually in tears."

It's worth noting that Warner Chappell Music controls Bowie's catalog, meaning the label — not Meta — holds discretion over licensing.

Critics Call It Tone-Deaf at Best

Jeremy D. Larson, deputy director of Pitchfork, acknowledged that repurposing songs for ads is a well-worn tradition — he points to a Carnival Cruise commercial built around an Iggy Pop song about heroin addiction — but flagged something particular about this pairing.

"Meta choosing this specific song where the context for human connection is the apocalypse seems either really ignorant or really insidious," Larson told WIRED. "I don't know, maybe in that context it's genius."

He added that using Bowie's work for AI promotion "feels especially and specifically nonconsensual" — a pointed observation given ongoing industry debates about artists' rights in the AI era.

A Pattern of Fumbled Feel-Good Ads

This isn't an isolated stumble. Big Tech has been pumping out emotionally-loaded ads for years in an attempt to get ahead of mounting public skepticism, and the track record is rough.

  • Anthropic released its own cinematic AI ad just weeks ago, opening on a burning building and rows of graves before pivoting to optimism and humpback whales.
  • Google ran a 2024 ad where a father uses Gemini to ghostwrite a fan letter — in his daughter's voice — to Olympic hurdler Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone.
  • During the 2022 Super Bowl, FTX aired an ad starring Larry David dismissing great inventions throughout history (the fork, the lightbulb, the toilet) before encouraging viewers not to "miss out on crypto." FTX filed for bankruptcy nine months later.

What This Means for Founders and Marketers

The deeper issue these ads expose isn't song clearance or lyric selection — it's a product credibility gap. When a company needs a two-minute emotional montage to convince people its technology isn't making life worse, the technology itself may not yet be doing that job.

For founders building AI products, the lesson is concrete: brand sentiment is downstream of product experience, not upstream of it. Lavish ad campaigns that lean on nostalgia and celebrity imagery tend to backfire when the underlying product hasn't yet earned that goodwill.

Meta's ad closes with CEO Mark Zuckerberg writing that the company is "focused on giving every person the tools to reach your full potential." Whether that ambition is matched by the actual products — including the smart glasses the ad conspicuously promotes — remains the more pressing question for anyone watching the AI space closely.