OpenAI built its empire on hype and headlines, not commercials. But now, the AI giant is stepping into ads, buying airtime beside Bud Light and insurance mascots during NFL primetime. At first glance, it looks like a tech giant flexing for the mainstream. Look closer, and the move reads less like marketing and more like defense. Some experts suggest OpenAI's first advertising foray is a costly show of strength that hints at a deeper insecurity: the struggle to make AI feel credible, not just clickable.
Among those experts is Yusuf Gad, a brand strategist for tech startups with a history of creating and dominating new market categories. His work is known for turning abstract ideas into market movements that investors and consumers can actually rally behind. At his consultancy, Win the Brand War, he helps companies navigate the very battles OpenAI is now waging in public.
The campaign’s fatal flaw, according to Gad, is its focus. It's designed to build consumer awareness for trivial uses when one of the company’s more urgent problems is the quiet but pervasive professional stigma surrounding its product. While the ads showcase consumer-friendly uses, they do little to address a core challenge holding back deep adoption: the fear that using AI makes an employee seem lazy or, worse, replaceable. In short: they're ill-focused and ineffective.
"They have 700 or 800 million users, but what they don't have are millions of people paying to use ChatGPT professionally. But despite that gap, these ads aren't undermining the narrative that you're lazy or replaceable for using AI," Gad says.
Perception is reality: In the court of public opinion, using AI still counts as cutting corners. "The most critical stat is from a study on perceived engineering skills: when people found out a coder used AI, their assessment of that coder's competency dropped. That is the narrative you have to fight."
Gad contends that what AI truly needs is a "permission campaign." Drawing an analogy to the "Marlboro Man," which normalized a controversial product, his take is that the primary goal should be to grant users and employers the social license to embrace AI without guilt or fear. That battle, he maintains, belongs on professional platforms like LinkedIn, a starkly different arena from Monday Night Football.
Permission to proceed: "AI doesn't need an awareness campaign. It needs a permission campaign," insists Gad. "It needs to give people permission to use AI without feeling lazy, and give employers permission to allow its use at work without their employees fearing they'll be fired."
Shots fired: "The first company to win the brand war will be the one that convinces businesses to use AI to augment their workforce, not replace employees. When you solve the toolchain within the business environment, you also solve for the home environment." In the fight between AI giants, that message could decide who owns the narrative of progress and who gets buried under public distrust. Every ad, every slogan, every platform choice becomes a declaration of values in a war where perception, not product, will ultimately crown the winner.
If the campaign isn't designed to win over professionals, then what's the point? Gad’s take is cynical: it’s not marketing, it’s economic defense. In his view, advertising for a market leader often functions less as a tool for growth and more as one for defense. Under this analysis, the massive cost serves as a financial moat, sending a clear message to competitors like Anthropic and Grok. The choice of platform, Gad affirms, is a deliberate play for cultural dominance, putting OpenAI in the same territory as household names like Bud Light.
Chess, not checkers: "Advertising isn't really an awareness strategy. It's an inoculation strategy. You spend money on advertising to inoculate yourself from the competition." It's brand warfare disguised as marketing, a show of force meant to keep rivals off the field. Or, as Gad puts it, "it's not bandwidth optimization." It's about owning the entire broadcast.
Up in smoke: The company’s strategic confusion comes at a fragile moment for the AI economy. Gad warned that investors are growing restless as costs soar, calling the current boom "one big bet on AI." "When weed was legalized in Canada, every street suddenly had two or three weed shops. Now they're all closing down. That same dynamic is going to happen to the AI industry," Gad predicts.
Against that backdrop, OpenAI’s strategy can be seen in a different light: as a war of attrition. The result is a campaign that could be highly effective in a streaming environment that hits a captive audience "when they're most relaxed, when they're at their most mentally vulnerable." For Gad, the flawed ad campaign is merely a symptom of a deeper, more chaotic brand strategy.
He points to a pattern of "bizarre" and incoherent decisions—from launching "porn chatbots" while courting family-friendly advertisers to neglecting to use their own revolutionary Sora technology to create the ads—as evidence of a company whose actions are at odds with its long-term goals. That internal chaos, he suggests, is precisely why OpenAI may feel it must resort to a strategy of sheer financial force.
"That may be OpenAI's strategy in a nutshell. Just to grind it out as if for a war of advertising. We're just going to outspend you guys until you drop," he concludes. In the end, dominance might come less from innovation than from being the last one standing when the dust settles.
