OpenAI's initial Super Bowl ad was a high-concept, tech-centric piece. The expectation for their next ad is a shift towards showing tangible, everyday use cases, aiming to demystify AI for the average consumer and integrate ChatGPT into their daily lives, much like a classic Budweiser commercial appeals to the masses.
Related Insights
The campaign's simple 'keep thinking' message subtly reframes Anthropic's AI as a human-augmenting tool. This marks a significant departure from the company's public reputation for focusing on existential AI risk, suggesting a deliberate effort to build a more consumer-friendly and less threatening brand.
To introduce advanced technology without alienating its broad user base, Moonpig framed generative AI within a simple, familiar concept: 'AI stickers.' This approach drove massive adoption by making the feature feel magical and intuitive, rather than complex and technical.
Since ChatGPT's launch, OpenAI's core mission has shifted from pure research to consumer product growth. Its focus is now on retaining ChatGPT users and managing costs via vertical integration, while the "race to AGI" narrative serves primarily to attract investors and talent.
By releasing Sora as an API for developers and businesses rather than a standalone consumer app, OpenAI reveals its core strategy. The goal is to empower enterprise use cases like ad generation, not to build a new video destination to compete with platforms like YouTube or TikTok.
As consumers become wary of "AI," the winning strategy is integrating advanced capabilities into existing products seamlessly, like Google is doing with Gemini. The "AI" branding used for fundraising and recruiting will fade from consumer-facing marketing, making the technology feel like a natural product evolution.
OpenAI plans to personalize ads not just on immediate queries but by analyzing a user's entire chat history. This creates a powerful hybrid of Google's intent-based advertising and Meta's interest-based profiling, going beyond simple sponsored links to offer deeply contextual promotions.
The novelty of new AI model capabilities is wearing off for consumers. The next competitive frontier is not about marginal gains in model performance but about creating superior products. The consensus is that current models are "good enough" for most applications, making product differentiation key.
Analyst Eric Sufert predicts OpenAI's ad model will not be anchored to the content of a user's query, which could compromise trust in the answer's objectivity. Instead, it will function like Instagram's feed, where ads are targeted based on a user's broader conversion history, independent of the immediate conversational context.
Instead of contributing to the AI hype, Monday.com's campaign acknowledged the market's collective feeling of being overwhelmed by AI buzz but underwhelmed by its tangible benefits. This human-centric approach resonated by focusing on the user's emotional state rather than just listing technological capabilities.
The goal for advertising in AI shouldn't just be to avoid disruption. The aim is to create ads so valuable and helpful that users would prefer the experience *with* the ads. This shifts the focus from simple relevance to actively enhancing the user's task or solving their immediate problem.
