On February 9, 2025, NFL fans were treated to the biggest sporting event in the country – the Super Bowl LIX. This year, the 59th edition, saw the Philadelphia Eagles beat the Kansas City Chiefs 40-22 in the Championship game. However, this edition also saw a new and innovative addition that thrilled all the tech enthusiasts worldwide.
OpenAI debuted at the premier tournament by airing its first-ever television commercial. Amidst the big buzz around DeepSeek R1 disrupting the AI industry and potentially causing a huge crash in the market, OpenAI comes out with this television commercial. It is the first AI Super Bowl ad. After suffering a loss of more than a billion dollars from its stock market, OpenAI makes a huge leap in the advancement of AI and its foray into the creative field.
The AI Super Bowl ad, titled ‘The Intelligence Age,’ is 60 seconds long and it costs nearly $14 million. It artistically uses dot animation to convey a very important and poignant point – AI is the most transformative innovation in the modern age of humanity. It does so by smartly placing AI alongside humanity’s other transformative innovations such as the discovery of fire, building the wheel for transportation, horse-riding, ocean exploration, steam locomotives, the light bulb, X-ray, human flight, discovery of DNA, discovery of television, and space exploration. It finally ends with the rise of the Internet and finally the birth of AI.
The advertisement ends with the line, “All progress has a starting point,” hinting at the fact that AI is still developing and is at its nascent stage. However, it will be one of the most important discoveries of humankind in time like the others mentioned above.
Super Bowl advertising slots are extremely expensive since it is the most watched event in the US. Therefore, being able to place a commercial in any of the slots during the event is the biggest marketing move by any company. OpenAI, fully aware of the potential that Super Bowl advertising brings, strategically included some of its latest developments within the company inside the OpenAI Super Bowl ad.
One such development is the shift from its former blossom logo into a more minimalist aesthetic. This rebrand needed a large set of eyes on it, and OpenAI did just that by buying a Super Bowl advertising slot. It would still use its iconic blossom logo, but only for research purposes. Another development would be OpenAI’s focus on practical AI applications rather than diving deep into AGI or superintelligence.
One of the main practical purposes that OpenAI highlighted via this advertisement is ChatGPT, their premier LLM model with over 300 million active users. OpenAI showed that ChatGPT can be used from now on to do business planning, language tutoring, etc. This strengthens AI’s role furthermore in society as a practical tool rather than an abstract concept.
Kate Rouch, the Chief Marketing Officer of OpenAI, spoke about reaching far and wide to non-tech savvy adopters with their commercial. As per the news website Maginative, she said, “We want the message to feel relevant to the audience that is watching the Super Bowl, which includes tens of millions of people who have no familiarity with AI.”
But the story behind the commercial also draws attention to the ‘Human vs AI’ debate, and the need for one with the arrival of the other. The final animation that was displayed at the Super Bowl advertising, showing advancements in human innovations from fire to space explorations to the Internet to AI, was done entirely by human artists.
While Open AI did utilize its text-to-video AI model Sora to prototype ideas and explore camera treatments during the creative process, it still had to rely heavily upon human touch for the final product. OpenAI and their team are promoting this aspect of human creativity and have been very open about it.
“This is a celebration of human creativity and an extension of human creativity,” said Rouch. After the Super Bowl, OpenAI has scheduled a designated public forum for discussion about the advertisement. Kate Rouch and David Droga, the CEO of Accenture Song/droga5, will be offering insights into their creative process and vision for AI’s role in society.
