Our Favorite Super Bowl Ad: Smart Phone Nerds

Move over, David Beckham, Matthew Broderick, Jerry Seinfeld and Donald Trump. The Super Bowl commercial that caught our attention was a Best Buy spot called “Phone Innovators” featuring none other than Big Think favorite Ray Kurzweil. 

“I’m Ray Kurzweil,” the futurist and inventor says in the commercial. “I gave your words a voice,” his phone then says. 

Watch the commercial here:

Kurzweil appeared along with other innovators such as Philippe Kahn, who created the camera phone, Neil Papworth, the British engineer who sent the first text message, Kevin Systrom of Instagram, Jim McKelvey, co-founder of the mobile payment platform Square and Chris Barton and Avery Wang, the audio signal processing pioneers behind Shazam.

The most humorous moment came during the appearance of Paul and David Bettner, creators of the social Scrabble game Words with Friends, who benefited from enormous publicity when Alec Baldwin couldn’t resist the urge to play their mobile game on an airplane last year. 

According to Best Buy, while other brands featured widely recognizable celebrities from the worlds of sports and entertainment, “Silicon Valley inventors are today’s stars.” 

Best Buy also released a three-minute version of the commercial that explains each innovation in a bit more detail. “I invented a computer that could recognize printed letters,” says Kurzweil. “It was really a solution in search of a problem — we didn’t know what it was good for.”

Watch the video here:

Follow Daniel Honan on Twitter: @danielhonan