OpenAI’s Super Bowl ad fumble

OpenAI's Super Bowl ad was unique, on-brand and had a compelling POV, but it missed a huge opportunity: Selling consumers on practical use cases, not just vision.

No question, the commercial was unique, eye-catching and on-brand. But after 55 seconds of beautiful visuals of defining moments in history (making fire, broadcast TV, space travel, the dialup internet), the tone and coloring shifted. Black pointillism became stark blue and white.

A voiceover asks: "What do you want to create next?"

And that's it.

Viewers are left wondering if OpenAI wants people to use ChatGPT as a launchpad to create history-defining moments, or to ask what kind of bird they're looking at.

As OpenAI's CMO told Fast Company, "What we’re attempting to do here is two things. Find that middle ground, which is to say, on one hand it is important that people understand this isn’t status quo. This is the dawn of the intelligence age. There’s something important happening historically here that you should know about. But also that this is a tool in your pocket right now that can do tons of interesting things for you.”
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That's a hard sell in a 60-second Super Bowl ad.

There's data showing that the ad didn't resonate as well as it could have. Check out these results from Adweek's Super Bowl commercial ranker:

Emotional reaction:
The ChatGPT commercial ranked 57th out of 59 spots, based on consumers' measured emotional response, according to System 1.

Viewer engagement:
48th out of 59, based on the ability to generate online activity, according to EDO.

Online chatter:
23rd out of 55 measured spots, according to Hootsuite. That's a bit better but still trailed executions for Google Pixel (16th) and Salesforce (17th).

I think it would have been far better to focus on just one of those angles - and not try to do both. Perhaps:

✅ Get more people to try ChatGPT by showing them that it's quicker and easier to do a lot of really basic things.
✅ Make them feel empowered and confident.
✅ Then give them a payoff (in a different ad at a later point). Tell these new users that because they use ChatGPT, they are helping to make history.

That sounds cool and compelling.