Exclusive: Inside OpenAI’s Super Bowl ad playbook

The news cycle is seemingly always full of OpenAI stories. The state of various investments from fellow tech giants like Nvidia and Microsoft, the competitive landscape between other big AI players like Google and Anthropic, and, of course, the more existential questions surrounding the direction of artificial intelligence and its impacts on society.

For its new Super Bowl campaign, OpenAI is focusing on a simpler narrative: how ChatGPT helps people build things that have real-world impact.

The company will roll out a 60-second national spot during the big game, but it has also made three regional ads, which are debuting exclusively on Fast Company. The regional spots (with both 30-second and long-form versions) profile three different American small businesses—a seed farm, a metal salvage yard, and a family-run tamale shop—that are utilizing ChatGPT to grow and thrive. 

According to OpenAI CMO Kate Rouch, more than half of ChatGPT users in the U.S. say it has helped them do something they previously thought was impossible. The company’s Super Bowl strategy aims to tell those stories.

“Our core brand belief is that free access to these tools unlocks possibilities for people, and that anyone can build,” Rouch says. “We are for that person with an idea that doesn’t know how to make their idea real. Now they can, and that’s so much more important to us than any other thing we could use the Super Bowl for.”

ChatGPT Stories

For Rouch, these ads are personal. In fact, the guy who runs the salvage yard in one spot is actually her neighbor. “That’s how this series started,” she says. “He was showing me how he was using [ChatGPT]. That’s real. That’s cool. So the truth of this is how people are using the product.” 

The creative approach here is essentially a small-business extension of the vibe the brand unveiled back in September, showing individuals using ChatGPT for everyday things like finding recipes, sourcing exercise tips, and planning a road trip.

It’s not the first time Rouch has used hyper-specific personal stories to illustrate the power of technology. When she was CMO at Coinbase, the brand used a similar approach to show that the crypto exchange and payments platform is a utility for everyday people, and a safe, dependable, and sensible option for modern commerce far away from Silicon Valley or Wall Street. The opportunity for Coinbase was to “leverage its position to help give regular people a voice,” she told me at the time. “This is not crypto bros and Lambos.”

OpenAI faces a similar challenge of convincing people its tools are for more than asking simple questions. These ads, Rouch says, are a way to platform the very real stuff people are building with the technology.

“Millions of people are using ChaGPT every day to do meaningful things in their lives that extend their sense of what’s possible and help them in real ways: running businesses, caretaking for their children and parents’ health, exploring their own health,“ she says. “This is happening and it matters.” 

Thankfully, OpenAI takes its brand challenges seriously enough not to jump on the Super Bowl AI gimmick bandwagon (see Svedka Vodka’s big game fever dream), instead emphasizing how many human minds and hands went into creating this campaign.

OpenAI needs to be telling more stories like these. For as much enthusiasm as there is around AI from brands, many people are currently feeling existential dread over the technology. The good news for a company like OpenAI is that it’s liberated from selling capital “T” transformation in its ad work. Now the onus is on them to make it more human.

Check out the long-form versions of each ad below.

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