OpenAI sharpens its focus on big-spending corporate advertisers

OpenAI's corporate ambitions are now turning toward a new front: advertising teams. According to a job listing on the company's careers page, OpenAI is hiring for an enterprise ad marketing lead role based in San Francisco. The position is tasked with shaping "the content, thought leadership, events and demand-generation programs needed to drive our enterprise advertising business and long-term growth."

The role comes with a salary range of $374,000 to $415,000 a year, plus equity. The candidate is also expected to "shape the narrative that positions OpenAI as the premium advertising platform for marketers around the world" and cement the company as "a trusted, differentiated platform for enterprise advertisers and agencies."

The strategy is already playing out in practice. One U.S. ad executive familiar with OpenAI's sales process said the company's representatives have been "very upfront" that they're currently focused on building a product for enterprise-level businesses. New features added to OpenAI's ad management platform bear this out — for instance, the custom audiences feature now requires a minimum audience size of 25,000 people, which Accuracast group CEO Farhad Divecha says makes it effectively useless for most small businesses: "Most small businesses just don't have a customer base of 25,000 people."

Other features added to the platform are similarly geared toward advertisers running large or more complex campaigns: alerts for dwindling budgets, account health metrics, and campaign performance charts built for presenting to leadership. These tools are things a small business owner running their own ads would almost never need — but they're exactly what a marketing team juggling dozens of campaigns, or a CMO who needs numbers to report upward, would want.

Brian Kane, chief operating officer of Sourcepoint by Didomi, put it this way: "OpenAI is clearly building a platform capable of supporting large advertisers, but it's still too early to call this a fully enterprise-grade advertising platform. The current feature set feels more sales-driven than truly enterprise-focused." At the same time, OpenAI is also building a separate team to bring small and midsize businesses onto the platform — since, ultimately, they remain the backbone of any sustainable ad business.