The challenge is formidable: Create an ad campaign that somehow shows a brands integral role in a pivotal moment of human history. But also, like, make it fun?
When OpenAIs ChatGPT hit 100 million users two months after its launch in November 2022, a UBS study declared it the fastest-growing consumer application in history. Now at upwards of 400 million users, ChatGPT might be the best-known consumer product to invest the least in advertising. Historic product awareness, zero brand awareness.
For OpenAI chief marketing officer Kate Rouch, the Super Bowl was the perfect stage to start telling the world what the brand actually means.
Obviously, 130 million people are watching this, says Rouch. ChatGPT has 400 million users worldwide, so it’s not a niche technology. But we do have an opportunity to help them understand both the historical moment we’re in as well as the fact that they can participate today in this new movement and use these tools right now.
The ad cleverly uses ChatGPT’s cursor dot to show people how it thinks. Set to cheerful music, we see eras of human progress animated in the dots. From fire to the wheel to agriculture, trains, the lightbulb, air travel, space exploration, and computing, until we see the tagline, All progress has a starting point.
Its a conscious move to embed the product in the brand message. Rouch made a similar move back in the 2022 Super Bowl, when she was CMO at Coinbase. The crypto exchanges floating QR code ad went viral and drove so many people to its platform that the app crashed.
When you ask ChatGPT a question, the dot comes up, and that is actually expressed in other OpenAI products as part of the brand design that we just refreshed, says Rouch. People are sitting around at Super Bowl parties, and they’re going to be like, Whoa, hey do you use ChatGPT? How do you use it? And they’ll pull out their phones.
Building the brand
The Super Bowl ad comes at a compelling time for the OpenAI and ChatGPT brand. Long the leader in awareness, the recent launch of DeepSeek has added a new element of competition for what AI tools will be in peoples pockets.
Given its head start, Rouchs focus is on talking to the 400 million people who have been using ChatGPT about what exactly it can do. While we all worry about the impending robot apocalypse or hail a new technological age, theres a massive gray area between that existential level and using generative AI to help you write a better email. The brands job is to bridge that divide.
What we’re attempting to do here is two things, says Rouch. 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.
Thats where the Super Bowl ad comes in.
Connecting the dots
To create OpenAIs first major brand ad, Rouch enlisted Accenture Song CEO David Droga and his agency, which have created many Super Bowl ads for brands. The agency’s approacha peppy, product-first narrativehas a familiar connection to work Drogas namesake agency Droga5 made for the original Google Pixel back in 2016. Back then, it was the search bar transforming into a phone. Here, its the dots illustrating the historical context of these new AI tools. In both cases, the message comes through loud and clear: This technology is about to change your life.
Droga and Song have long been bullish on AI. In 2023, Song parent company Accenture announced it would spend $3 billion on AI over three years, and Droga has talked about the impact generative AI would have on advertising creative, emphasizing these tools would allow humans to create better ideas quicker and more often.
Many brands start thinking about their Super Bowl work in the summer. Rouch started her job in December. She says the ad itself was created with humans, but the concepting and experimentation on ideas did utilize AI tools like OpenAIs video GenAI tool Sora. We use it as a concepting tool, so nothing you see in the ad was created by Sora, says Rouch. But because we made this on a pretty compressed timeline, it really helped the creatives prototype, experiment with camera angles, and things like that, all to speed up the process.
For OpenAI, the Super Bowl is an announcement of its ambition to go beyond a ubiquitous product and become the next iconic tech brand. Its got the hype, now Rouch is looking to add the emotion to its brand.
At OpenAI, the mission is to create safe AGI, or advanced artificial intelligence, that benefits all of humanity, says Rouch. That’s a very intentional mission, so you will see that in our ambition and approach to build the brand and interact with people.
If the Kansas City Chiefs win the Super Bowl on Sunday, Patrick Mahomes, Travis Kelce, and the rest of their teammates will have bragging rights as the National Football League (NFL)s first three-peat winners. Theyll also bag a cool $171,000 for the game, each.
Before Philadelphia fans accuse the Chiefs of getting special treatment, yes, Eagles players will earn the same amount if they win. And whichever team leaves New Orleans without the Lombardi Trophy will still get a decent consolation prize: A $96,000 paycheck per player.
Super Bowl contenders are receiving a better pay raise than most Americans did this year; the game paycheck is about 4.3% higher for the winners than in 2024 and about 7.9% higher for the losers.
Still, those paychecks mean that many players, not just the stars, may take a pay cut to get knocked around on the field. And the amounts start to look downright paltry, especially considering how much money is shelled out for all-things Super Bowl each February. The price of entry is steep, no matter how you participate.
While ticket sales plummeted in the week leading up to the Chiefs-Eagles matchup, the cheapest seats still cost more than $3,000. Meanwhile, some companies have reportedly spent $8 million or more for 30-second spots that will be among a broad variety of ads playing during breaks in the action. And Americans are projected to legally wager a record nearly $1.4 billion on the big game this year.
How Postseason Paychecks are set
Even as more money will be shelled out ahead of Sundays gamefrom beer to snacks to new TVs to jerseysthe paychecks for the players wont budge. Rather, the compensation rates for the winning and losing teams were set back in March 2020 as part of the NFLs Collective Bargaining Agreement, which is effective through the 2030 season.
The way players are compensated for postseason action is one of a few key differences from the regular season. Players are generally paid their annual salary on a weekly basis over the course of the regular 18-game season, but those paychecks stop once the postseason begins.
Instead, the league specifies how much players are compensated for each of the playoff gameswin or losewhich ranged from $49,500 to $54,500 for this years wild card and division playoff games, then bumped up to $77,000 for the conference championship games. The league has up to 15 days to pay players for each postseason game.
All told, the postseason amounts to more than $350,000 in additional compensation for players on this years winning Super Bowl team and $275,000-plus for those players on the losing team. And even players on the teams who dont see any playing time are due a paycheck, so long as they are on the official 53-player roster, active/inactive list or reserve/injured list.
The league’s billion-dollar enterprise
Meanwhile, the NFL is on the hook to pay some $75 million-plus to the hundreds of players across the 14 teams that were in the playoffs this season, including more than $14 million to the Chiefs and Eagles players after Sundays Super Bowl game alone.
That may seem like a lot of money, but its a small droplet in one of those massive Gatorade coolers. The NFL now generates more than $20 billion in annual revenue and is on track to achieve the $25 billion revenue goal that Commissioner Roger Gooddell targeted by 2027.
With so much money flying around, the leagues current crop of stars are also cashing in. Mahomes, the Chiefs quarterback, signed a 10-year, $450 million contract back in 2020, which means he earns an average annual salary of $45 million. Jalen Hurts, quarterback for the Eagles, signed a five-year, $255 million contract extension back in 2023, which sees him earning an even higher average-annual salary of $51 million.
Thanks to their contracts, the quarterbacks could earn more than $2.5 million each week of the regular seasonand that doesnt include lucrative endorsement deals.
Losers losing out less
Of course, for every Mahomes and Hurts, there are dozens of players who dont share the limelight, nor those lucrative paychecks. The league minimum is currently $795,000, so the postseason paychecks represent a pretty considerable bonus for these players.
While Super Bowl winners get even more perks, including the famously blingy ring, theres an interesting quirk to the Collective Bargaining Agreement: Super Bowl losers are actually earning a higher share of the winners paycheck as time goes on. When the Chiefs lost the 2021 Super Bowl, those players took home exactly 50% of the pay of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers players. By 2031, the losing team will earn about 67% of the winning teams payout.
Turns out, even the losers get lucky sometimes.
