How Ring's Super Bowl LX Ad Sparked a Privacy Firestorm

Ring walked into Super Bowl LX with a feel-good ad about finding lost pets using AI. Within 72 hours, the brand was at the center of intense consumer privacy backlash. Here's how it happened, and what the data says about how fast a narrative can turn.

The Setup: "Search Party" and the Promise of AI-Powered Pet Rescue

Ring's Super Bowl LX ad, "Search Party," introduced an AI-powered feature that activates a network of Ring cameras to help locate missing pets. On paper, it was a winning concept: emotionally resonant, tech-forward, and tailor-made for a Super Bowl audience.

Early response confirmed the instinct. Among Super Bowl-specific mentions, 35.2% were positive vs. 24.4% negative, making it the only segment across the entire monitoring period to carry a net positive lean. Keyword clusters around "lost," "pets," "find," and "neighbors" dominated early conversation, and pre-game and game-day coverage on February 7th and 8th showed 60.1% of all Ring mentions were Super Bowl-focused.

But the same feature that charmed early viewers, a coordinated network of home cameras, contained the seeds to shift the narrative.

The Pivot: From Pet-Finding to Surveillance Backlash

By Monday, February 9, the narrative had already shifted. Super Bowl ad mentions had dropped to 21.0% of daily conversation, while discussion of Ring's partnership with Flock Safety, a company providing automated license plate readers to law enforcement, overtook it at 22.9%.

The turning point came when the Electronic Frontier Foundation labelled the Search Party feature a "surveillance nightmare." That phrase appeared in 2.1% of all brand-relevant mentions and became the dominant frame for editorial coverage across technology and civil liberties outlets. What began as ad commentary had become investigative reporting.

February 10 became the single biggest day of the monitoring period, surpassing even Super Bowl Sunday's volume, as media coverage connected Ring's camera network to broader concerns about law enforcement access, federal data sharing, and immigration enforcement. By this point, Super Bowl content had collapsed to just 9.0% of daily conversation.

The Numbers: A Brand Conversation That Moved Against Itself

PeakMetrics monitored 82,688 raw Twitter mentions over the window, peaking at 34,770 on game day and again two days later.

The overall sentiment picture was stark:

Negative sentiment across all brand mentions ran nearly 3.5 times higher than positive, a ratio almost entirely driven by Flock Safety discussion, where 61.4% of posts were negative and only 4.4% were positive.

The reach figures underscore the scale of exposure. Ring's total potential reach across the monitoring period hit 154.7 billion, with Super Bowl ad coverage averaging 49.8 million reach per post thanks to syndication through major outlets including Yahoo News (1.37B reach per article), CNBC, and AP.

The Narrative Timeline

February 7–8 (Super Bowl Buzz): Pre-game coverage was overwhelmingly ad-focused. "Search Party" dominated early conversation. Ring's pet-finding concept generated genuine enthusiasm and strong ad-recall-style engagement.

February 9–10 (Privacy Backlash): Flock Safety discussion overtook the Super Bowl ad narrative. EFF commentary went viral. Investigative coverage linked Ring's camera network to law enforcement access, federal data sharing, and ICE. Daily mention volume peaked at its highest point of the entire period, arriving after the game rather than on it.

February 11–13 (Partnership Termination): Ring announced the termination of its Flock Safety partnership on February 12. The announcement generated its own coverage wave, with Flock-related content climbing to 40.2% of all mentions on February 13, framed widely as a direct result of the Super Bowl backlash.

Boycott Language and Viral Amplification

One of the most consequential content moments of the monitoring period wasn't Ring's ad, a news article, or a brand statement. It was a consumer tweet.

A viral thread urging users to "throw your ring camera in the trash", alongside calls to cancel Spotify and avoid Starbucks, generated 920+ retweets per instance across a wide retweet chain and swept Ring into a broader Amazon boycott movement. 17.1% of all brand-relevant mentions contained boycott or cancellation language.

A Facebook post framing the ad as depicting "the horrific future of America" generated 1,161 reactions. A Reddit thread provided step-by-step instructions for disabling Ring's Search Party, Neighbor, and Amazon Sidewalk features.

In contrast, total retweets across the SB ad segment averaged just 7.2 per post, meaning the viral boycott content dramatically outperformed official coverage in organic amplification.

Bot Activity: Below Average, But Disproportionately Amplifying

Ring's 6.2% bot rate was notably lower than most consumer brand categories monitored during the same Super Bowl window, where rates typically ranged from 9% to 16%. However, bot-associated accounts generated 2.5 times more retweets on average than accounts rated as unlikely bots (296.6 vs. 117.2 average retweets), indicating that automated accounts were concentrated in the highest-amplification threads, predominantly the boycott and anti-surveillance content.

What This Case Study Reveals About Brand Risk in the AI Era

Ring's Super Bowl experience is a case study in second-order narrative risk: the gap between what a brand intends to communicate and what its technology actually enables, as understood by an informed and activated public.

Several dynamics are worth noting for brand strategists and communications teams:

The ad worked. The context didn't. The "Search Party" concept had genuine consumer appeal, with 35.2% positive sentiment in isolation representing a solid result for a Super Bowl ad. The problem wasn't the creative; it was the broader ecosystem of partnerships and data-sharing arrangements that the ad inadvertently put in the spotlight.

Surveillance backlashes move faster than PR cycles. Peak conversation volume arrived not on game day but two days later, driven by editorial and Reddit coverage rather than social reaction to the ad itself. Brands with complex technology partnerships need to anticipate that a major media moment can surface pre-existing vulnerabilities, and that the backlash timetable may not align with traditional comms response windows.

Civil liberties orgs have become powerful narrative accelerants. The EFF's "surveillance nightmare" framing appeared in 2.1% of all brand mentions and was cited across hundreds of articles. A single authoritative critical voice from a trusted institution can anchor an entire negative coverage cycle.

Partnership risk is brand risk. The Flock Safety relationship predated the ad, but the ad gave it a massive new audience. Any feature or product launch that increases public attention on a brand's technology stack is also an audit of that brand's partnerships.

About PeakMetrics

PeakMetrics is a narrative intelligence platform that helps brands, agencies, and public affairs teams monitor, measure, and respond to the conversations that matter. This case study was produced using PeakMetrics' real-time media monitoring and sentiment analysis capabilities applied to Ring's Super Bowl LX media moment.

Interested in how PeakMetrics can help your brand track narrative risk in real time? Get in touch.