Columnist Mark Ritson is amused that OpenAI’s first global brand campaign features emotional ads shot on film and broadcast on TV. Most marketers would have reached that conclusion without a super-AI.
OpenAI has finally done something interesting.
No, it hasn’t achieved the Singularity or ushered in nuclear Armageddon. It has launched something far more radical than that: a proper brand campaign.
After years of product launches masquerading as marketing strategy and CEO keynotes pretending to build the brand, OpenAI has finally gone full Field and Binet.
After an initial launch in the USA this week, the campaign hit the UK using the most advanced brand-building technology: the ‘TV ad,’ bolstered by that other advanced digital medium: ‘outdoor advertising.’ Elke Karskens, head of international marketing for OpenAI, recently told The Drum that she is in “building mode”. Let’s look at the building blocks.
The spots show mundane moments of quiet triumph, superimposing the prompt that led to this outcome.
A man manages ten pull-ups while an exercise routine scrolls over the top of his exertions.
A woman is quietly impressed with her boyfriend’s home-cooked meal as the menu runs across the final fifteen seconds of the ad.
The message is simple and profound.
AI is here for everyday tasks.
“With more and more people across the UK using and loving ChatGPT, we want to showcase how it can make your life easier and help you do more of what matters to you,” says OpenAI’s Karskens.
Want to go deeper? Ask The Drum
This move cannot come quickly enough. Whisper it while your computer sleeps, for all the hype and spectacular product advances – the marketing behind AI has been terrible to date.
How terrible has the marketing of AI been so far?
There are the risible brand names that sound like failed Bond villains (Claude, Gemini, Copilot).
The confusing, overlapping upgrades that have seen a platform like ChatGPT launch fifteen, yes fifteen, named upgrades in less than three years of commercial operation. Catchy names like GPT-4, GPT-4o, GPT-4o mini and o4-mini beat the user into stupefied submission.
Add in the extra layer of confusion that comes when these platforms offer to switch between half a dozen other products during any task, and you have a recipe for total indistinctive non-differentiation.
Do you know which AI platforms you have registered for?
Me neither.
The pricing and purchase experience are similarly flawed.
Bemusing, constantly changing pricing structures that include credits, tiers, paywalls, pro features and shifting usage limits leave consumers confused.
“ChatGPT Pro” at £200 a month sits alongside free tiers, usage credits, and pricing models that change faster than a startup’s mission statement. Midway during purchase, you are often offered the chance to buy extra software at a low, low price. By the end of the acquisition of supposedly next-generation software, you need a shower, a lie-down and two Advil.
And the results are exactly what you’d expect when engineers run marketing. 48% of US adults say they don’t understand what AI tools actually do. Nearly half of current users do not distinguish between different brands or types of AI.
All this sub-par marketing and consumer confusion is bad for business.
The entire global consumer AI market was worth $12bn last year. Sounds impressive? Netflix makes that in just a quarter.
The reason it’s so small isn’t because of a lack of interest or uptake; it’s because the differentiation and subsequent pricing of the AI giants is completely laughable. Only 3% of ChatGPT users pay for subscriptions. OpenAI admits just 5% of weekly active users fork over any cash whatsoever. Things are looking genuinely stupid in the realm of artificial intelligence.
And the big companies can no longer point to adoption curves to save them. Growth has flatlined faster than a startup’s culture after Series B funding.
Usage in North America and Europe has stalled.
Anthropic is surviving on enterprise deals because consumers couldn’t pick Claude out of a lineup if their lives depended on it. Perplexity loses $7m in a good month. Grok’s parent company, xAI, generates around $41m in revenue and loses $1bn every month as it tries and fails to compete at scale with OpenAI and Google. Meanwhile, Google’s Gemini and Microsoft’s Copilot are drowning in complexity. Little more than buttons that get in the way of everyday usage.
Yes, I appreciate that we are operating in the Bezos realm, where short-term profitability is a distraction. But with so many undifferentiated players in the market, such little growth and so many problems in monetizing their offers – there is a code red moment approaching for the whole AI industry.
And now VCs are starting to call it.
Recent surveys show they’re rating generative AI adoption as “stalled outside core enthusiast audiences” – VC-speak for “we’re fucked if something doesn’t change.”
And here’s where it gets delicious.
After years of sneering at traditional media, proclaiming the death of television, and genuflecting at the altar of digital creation and programmatic media, what does OpenAI do when the chips are down?
It buys TV ads.
Lots of them.
Not performance marketing.
Not growth hacking.
Not some AI-optimized, micro-targeted, real-time-bidding horseshittery.
Just good old-fashioned television advertising. The same medium that built Coca-Cola, Nike, and every other brand worth a damn since 1951.
So much for AI-generated creative, too. OpenAI ignored its own PR playbook and hired human directors, real actors in actual settings. Then, it produced old-school 30-second ads. It even shot on 35mm film because nothing says “trust in our digital future” like the analogue cinematography they used for Gone with the Wind. It’s like watching a teenager finally admit their parents were right all along.
Suggested newsletters for you
Catch up on the most important stories of the day, curated by our editorial team.
Stay up to date with a curated digest of the most important marketing stories and expert insights from our global team.
Learn how to pitch to our editors and get published on The Drum.
The strategy is textbook old-school marketing, whether OpenAI knows it or not. Build mental availability through broad reach. Create emotional connections through storytelling. Establish trust through consistency. Maintain an excess share of voice with your scale becoming a proper moat. The fundamentals that work whether you’re selling soap or superintelligence.
That said, these ads might mark a new era for AI, but that does not mean they are particularly impressive. We must wait for pre-testing data, but my bet is that these new ads are curiously short on emotion and even less impressive when it comes to the degree to which they are branded ChatGPT. Maybe the dominant player (with about 70% of the consumer market) thinks it just needs to promote AI in general. Because these are curiously generic ads and certainly won’t alleviate the lack of distinctiveness across AI offerings.
OpenAI’s campaign is an admission that for all the talk of disruption and democratization, AI companies have failed at the most basic task of all: making people care.
It has discovered what every CPG marketer learned decades ago: building a brand is harder than building a product. It requires discipline, consistency, and the humility to accept that consumers don’t give a toss about your technology. They care about what it does for them. Benefit over feature. Brand, not product.
The irony is delicious. The industry that promised to revolutionize everything has been forced to embrace the most traditional marketing approach imaginable. Turns out you can’t algorithm your way to distinctiveness. You can’t A/B test a path to emotional connection. And you definitely can’t API your route to mass adoption.
Welcome to marketing, tech bros. The water’s lovely once you stop trying to disrupt it.
Mark Ritson is a former marketing professor, brand consultant, and award-winning columnist. He is also the founder of the MiniMBA in Brand Management, which has just kicked off (but still has some spaces), and has trained thousands of brand managers on how to do it better.