POV: Could Claude or ChatGPT be the next Apple?

This September felt like someone fired a starting gun, with the debut ads for two of the biggest chatbots launching within weeks of each other. Anthropic unveiled its first-ever Claude campaign (created by Mother), quickly followed by OpenAI’s first dedicated ChatGPT campaign, made with Isle of Any. Both adverts told human-centred stories, about achievement, problem solving, everyday wonder. Both tapped into nostalgia and familiar cultural markers. Both were also very good.

Let’s start with Claude. Soundtracked by an instrumental version of Madvillain’s All Caps, the spot followed people solving problems, with a voiceover explaining that there’s “never been a better time” to have one. Beyond the clever decision to borrow from the cultural weight of Madvillain – Apple knew the force of the soundtrack, too – the ad featured a certain utopian energy. There were markers of the human hand too, with strewn paper, orchestras, bike shops and chess boards all present. Overall, there is a feeling that Claude stands for freshness and forward momentum in an era of pessimism.

ChatGPT’s campaign also felt optimistic. In a series of single-shot ads, Isle of Any focused on showing how ChatGPT can help make everyday tasks more achievable. Pull-Up, for example, follows a determined user trying to improve their pull-up game. Shot at dusk with an 80s patina, it could have easily ended with a Judd Nelson fist pump straight out of The Breakfast Club. “Emotion is everything,” says Elke Karskens, head of international marketing at OpenAI. “The feeling we want people to have is possibility… It’s that sense of everyday magic: the delight of discovering you can do something you didn’t think was possible.”

It’s clear that both brands invested time and money, but also deliberate thought into the tone of these adverts. It’s no wonder why. We’re reaching crunch time when it comes to AI marketing, with competition fiercer than ever. In fact, you only need to look to the San Francisco skyline right now, to see this competition play out in real time.

As one commuter captured back in April, billboards offering AI services are multiplying across the tech mecca. In September, one company (Listen Labs) even put up a billboard displaying a string of inscrutable numbers, as opposed to real human words, to stand out. The founder behind the now-viral billboard (Alfred Wahlforss) described the decision to CBS News as a “a moment of desperation” within the company’s efforts to recruit engineers in a city where “Mark Zuckerberg is giving $100 million offers to the best engineers”, and AI is everything, everywhere, all at once.

“The AI space is incredibly fast moving,” says Andrew Stirk, head of brand marketing at Anthropic, “with the implications of the technology touching so many different aspects of our lives and work.” This need for speed is colliding with public scepticism. As Andrew puts it, “Many people feel like AI is something that is happening to them, rather than for them.” So creative teams must move fast, but also carefully. “It is not easy moving fast while remaining purposeful and thoughtful,” he says. “Despite the speed and rate of change though, we have aimed to be intentional about how we approach our brand.”

At OpenAI, Elke describes the same tension: “The pace of improvements in AI capabilities combined with all the new features appearing in ChatGPT, means [the team] need to move faster than ever… But we’re intentional.”

Then there’s the harder challenge: love is hard to engineer. Yes, AI companies need to be intentional and keep pace technologically to be adopted, but to become absorbed and integrated deeply into our lives, they need to make a stamp culturally. Right now, “people readily switch between different [AI] models as new capabilities emerge,” Andrew says. But, he adds: “Brands will become important as people start to make deeper choices.”

The stakes of this challenge were brought into focus recently when Apple CEO Tim Cook told staff that AI will be “as big or bigger than the internet, smartphones, cloud computing and apps”. If Tim is right, AI brands will soon become a quotidian presence in our lives. And, just as Apple became the cultural computer company, one or a few players could do the same for AI.

The path to get there might differ for each company. Anthropic already has a devoted fanbase – “the people that use Claude tend to love Claude,” says Andrew – but its product is still relatively unknown to wider audiences. Andrew is also aware that this love is driven by a mix of strong “rational” and “emotional” reasons – or, a mix of technological and brand decisions. On the one hand, “it is the best AI for coding”, Andrew says, but people also “like the simplicity and elegance of the interface design, they talk about Claude’s character and its ability to sit with complexity rather than rushing to surface-level solutions.”

In order to speak to this target audience, Anthropic is actively showing its awareness of the limitations of AI, positioning Claude as helping expand humanity’s thinking and creativity, “not outsource or replace it,” says Andrew. This ethos shapes the brand visually, too. “We have an illustrator on the team who hand draws all our imagery. It is important to us to preserve the hand of the maker in our work – not gradients, rigid lines and Euclidean perfection but curves, organic shapes and colours.”

For OpenAI, the challenge now is not awareness, “it’s moving beyond it”. “People know ChatGPT exists, but now we want them to know what it can do for them in their everyday lives.” OpenAI, similarly, is framing ChatGPT as an assistant as well as a technological tool, an enhancer of human creativity rather than a replacement. (“ChatGPT is incredibly powerful. But it’s also super personal,” says Elke.) This push-and-pull of humanity vs technological prowess appears in the campaign itself. While OpenAI used AI behind the scenes (writing briefs and helping shape strategy), the final campaign was crafted by human talent, shot on 35mm film, “styled and directed by world-class creatives,” says Elke.

Looking at the long game, Elke understands the influence adverts like these could exert. “Over time, these campaigns will help shape not just perception of ChatGPT, but how society understands and adopts AI as a whole, anchored in human creativity, usefulness and possibility.”

Right now, it’s still early days in the AI ad race. There are some communication techniques that seem more successful than others: being honest, even about the bad stuff, spotlighting humans, 80s vignettes. But, in this pressure-cooker environment, one must also ask if there is enough room currently available in AI marketing to swing big on a cultural idea, and miss.

It’s no coincidence that The New York Times’ first review of the Macintosh in 1984 read that the “fundamental difference between the Mac and other personal computers is that the Macintosh is visually oriented rather than word oriented”. The publication was talking about the Mac’s graphic user interface, but it also applies to Apple’s brand approach. The Macintosh was coveted because it made computers visually and culturally seductive, not just advanced. The chatbot that does the same will define the next decade of AI.