OpenAI’s first major ChatGPT brand campaign lands as it builds out marketing vision – The Drum
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It’s a “big moment for us as a company,” the still-surging genAI leader’s international marketing head tells The Drum today.
September 29, 2025 | 7 min read
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ChatGPT, the flagship generative chatbot from OpenAI, now counts over 700 million weekly users worldwide. On a staggering trajectory of growth, that number is four times higher than last year. 200 million users have joined in the last six months.
It’s well on its way to a billion weekly users, then, and its first international brand campaign just might add another column to that digit. Launching today with an NFL Primetime slot in the US, the campaign will run across the US, UK and Ireland until the end of the year.
Leading the creative charge are a pair of 30-second TV spots, ‘Pull-up’ and ‘Cooking,’ that aim to show the breadth of those 700 million people’s relationships with their ChatGPTs. They’re simple, straightforward brand films depicting what a release calls the “everyday magic” of using the bot: in the first, a man does pull-ups in a park at sundown; the camera pulls back as we see it’s the result of a ChatGPT-inspired plan to achieve a pull-up by the autumn. In the second, a user has made a tasty meal for a date; the recipe, it’s revealed, came with a little help from ChatGPT.
The films, created by an in-house team working with agency Isle of Any and director Miles Jay, will run across linear TV, streaming and paid social. They’re joined by out-of-home spots featuring equally simple shots based on real use-cases of the software, shot by photographer Samuel Bradley with media work from PhD. Creator collaborations and other activity will follow.
It’s the brand’s first international campaign and its second major advertising release overall, following a Super Bowl spot earlier this year.
The launch comes just a week after Anthropic put out its own first brand campaign for ChatGPT competitor Claude. Clearly, as speculation around the trajectory of monetization and advertising within generative AI companies grows, the competition for user loyalty is heating up.
Elke Karskens, head of international marketing for OpenAI, was brought in six months ago to build out its international marketing function. She tells The Drum that she’s in “building mode,” developing a core team and position to roll out across the globe.
Awareness and user acquisition remain a priority, Karskens says, but the campaign’s real target is to help users build a “deeper emotional connection with the brand.”
“Fundamentally, preference does really matter and it matters to our business long-term as well. It’s a flywheel: the more you use not just this technology, but ChatGPT specifically, the more loyal you stay, the deeper your connection to the brand. This is all very much about deepening that brand love that people feel for ChatGPT.”
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Karskens acknowledges that the “competitive environment is warming up” in the gen AI space – just take a drive down Silicon Valley’s 101 Highway, she says, and you’ll see that it’s “AI company after AI company – or AI solutions from any other company – that are currently advertising. Given the space that we’re in and what we’re trying to achieve, I’m not surprised that people are starting to invest in advertising significantly.”
OpenAI’s approach to standing out in that increasingly crowded market, Karskens says, hinges on authenticity and “expanding the narrative of how AI and ChatGPT are being used.” Recent research, she says, finds seven out of 10 adults under 45 reporting that AI is helping them achieve their life goals; the campaign is a first step in exhibiting how users are “unlocking small moments of possibility of growth, of discovery and creation as well as productivity and efficiency. That’s very much what we’re trying to do with this work: to really shine a spotlight on those everyday moments.”
With that largely organically-grown userbase, OpenAI is of course embarking on its advertising journey from a running start. “We’re in a fantastic position from a brand perspective – we’re obviously super well-known. The job to be done here is going much deeper into that preference phase.”
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As for Karskens, her own vision for her new department is to expand its global marketing with grace and nuance. A Netherlands native, she says that she’s “personally always felt a lot of frustration when I still lived in the Netherlands in how brands and companies showed up. It’s almost like you’re not being taken seriously… It doesn’t feel right and I take it super, super seriously… It’s my own personal responsibility as a marketer in a position like this, at a company like this, at a phase like this, to make sure that the work that we ship really, deeply, connects and resonates with people, by taking that culture into consideration and being thoughtful of what matters to them.
“That’s my personal mission as a marketing leader: that my team develops the best possible work and that it shows up in the most locally relevant way.”
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