OpenAI’s first Super Bowl commercial served as a blinking prompt for the AI juggernaut to launch its first foray into mass marketing.

The high-concept spot, conceived by Chief Marketing Officer Kate Rouch and creative agency Accenture Song, was inspired by the pulsating button on ChatGPT, seen when the program waits for more queries from a user. The dot also bounces ahead of ChatGPT’s responses as it writes the next words it conveys to the searcher on the other end.

The ChatGPT dot was the central design element in the 60-second Super Bowl ad called “The Intelligence Age,” which ran in the second quarter of the game. The artists behind the commercial used pointillism, a technique that takes individual circles to create complex imagery.

Also read: How OpenAI’s Super Bowl ad stacked up against the others

The ad retells human history in dots, starting with one point, which divides into two, then four, like cells multiplying. The animation becomes increasingly more detailed, showing prehistoric people hunting, fire starting, wheels rolling, horses running, crops growing, ships sailing across the seas, the invention of TV, and so on.

The final line: What do you want to create next.

“The style is very graphic in that it’s black on white animation throughout,” Neil Heymann, Accenture Song’s global chief creative officer, told Ad Age. “It’s all derivative from [ChatGPT’s] interface, which is that pulsing black circle that comes up when you’re ready to ask a question or be inspired.”

OpenAI wanted the commercial to stand out from the colorful, celebrity-filled cacophony characteristic of the rest of the ads. “It’s Super Bowl, everything is cranked up as high as it can go, whether it’s the ads or the broadcast itself or the halftime show, everything is shouting,” Heymann said. “So, to just kind of lower our voice a little bit and have people pay closer attention, it seemed like a good strategy for differentiation.”

“Give people a minute of space,” Heymann said.

Eyes on AI in the game

Since 2022, when ChatGPT first emerged into the public consciousness, it has become synonymous with the AI revolution overtaking industries and people’s everyday queries. AI tools have become especially ubiquitous in advertising, where they have been met with excitement and dread. The enthusiasts see AI as a channel from which to pull new ideas and plumb for fresh insights. AI is powering ad tech and helping manage marketing budgets. AI doomsayers are concerned that the technology will deaden creativity and push out artists.

Read Ad Age’s guide to AI’s role in 2025 Super Bowl ads

ChatGPT has about 300 million weekly users, who use the text generator to discover ideas and dive down research holes. OpenAI also has image- and video-generators that conjure visuals from simple prompts.

This Super Bowl is a particularly high-stakes moment for the AI race, as the biggest tech companies including Google and Meta also promoted their platforms in commercials, while Salesforce and GoDaddy also had AI-focused commercials, and each took different approaches to demonstrate the technology and convince consumers of its usefulness. Google, for instance, produced an emotionally resonant ad about a father using Gemini Live, a voice assistant, to prep for his job search. The conversation with Gemini led the father to reflect on his most important job, caring for his daughter and family.

However, Google’s AI Super Bowl marketing already hit a rough patch, as errors were found in one of the 50 local ads the company created to highlight 50 small businesses that use Gemini in Workspace apps. One of the commercials depicted Gemini sharing faulty information; it appeared to get a basic fact wrong about Gouda on a Wisconsin cheese shop’s website. The ad was updated with correct information before airing, but the incident was another cautionary reminder about how the machines aren’t always reliable.

Meta, meanwhile, is promoting its Ray-Ban glasses with built-in AI. Two Meta commercials showed Chris Hemsworth and Chris Pratt using the glasses to identify famous pieces of art.

OpenAI’s commercial is certainly distinct from its rivals that have product-focused ads, demoing how AI works and its features. “Especially for a brand like ChatGPT, we just wanted to get a bit above that,” Heymann said. “We just felt that [the commercial] was bigger than seeing a bunch of screens and people kind of speaking into their iPads.”

Bounce in OpenAI’s step

OpenAI had kept its Super Bowl plans under tight wraps and did not publicly confirm that it was even in the game until the ad ran. On Thursday, Ad Age reported that it had bought the spot for the game, and Accenture Song shared a sneak preview before game time. This marks OpenAI’s first major, national brand campaign after mostly growing through word of mouth and live events around product rollouts. In December, OpenAI hired Rouch as its first CMO; she had worked with Accenture Song on Coinbase’s Super Bowl ad in 2022, which featured only an enigmatic bouncing QR code and didn’t even mention the brand.

The OpenAI ad has a subtly similar bounce to it with the dots. The dot was also the foundational element in OpenAI’s creative rebrand last week, when it introduced a new font and design aesthetic. The company introduced a series of OpenAI Sans fonts for use in marketing and within ChatGPT. The rebrand also introduced a soft sonic sound that seems to be reflected in the audio component of the Super Bowl commercial.

“They are a very design-centric company,” Heymann said.

Humans in the Super Bowl loop

OpenAI’s spot is an ode to AI, while keeping human creativity at the core, according to Heymann. Of course, Accenture Song used OpenAI tools, including video generator Sora, to help visualize parts of the ad in its early stages. However, designers were the main hands involved in the final version. With OpenAI’s products “we were able to pull together quite high fidelity animatics pretty early in the process,” Heymann said, adding that it was “human-produced animation” in the commercial that ran Sunday night.

OpenAI’s relationship with the creative community, from Hollywood to the ad industry, has been contentious at points. In 2023, the Hollywood strike was partly motivated by fears of AI taking over creative tasks previously done by large teams of people, and actors worried about studios relying more on AI-generated performances or even using their likenesses without permission.

OpenAI and other AI startups have heavily courted the studios and ad agencies to help build more sophisticated and highly trained large language models.

Asked why OpenAI opted against using Sora to entirely produce its first Super Bowl commercial, Heymann said: “We wanted to make sure, especially as it’s so early for them in marketing, that there was a visual style to it, that the pacing was right, that the music was right, that the creative decisions still informed most of it. And then, you know, in some cases, the technology was in the sidecar along the way.”