Days earlier than the Tremendous Bowl, Anthropic dropped a handful of Tremendous Bowl advertisements taking goal at OpenAI’s impending promoting mannequin for ChatGPT. The advertisements anthropomorphize OpenAI’s platform, imagining how the chatbot would possibly reply on a regular basis questions like “What do you consider my enterprise concept?” and “Can I get a six-pack rapidly?” The solutions, delivered by actors in cheerfully sycophantic robotic converse, begin out sounding like stilted however useful recommendation, earlier than veering into promotional marketing converse for a hypothetical advertiser on ChatGPT.
Instantly, the advertisements sparked a firestorm on-line. Some known as them good. Others known as them mean-spirited. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman felt so strongly, he crafted an earnest submit on X about why Anthropic’s advertisements had been so deceptive.
However improper transfer, bro. Anthropic, considered one of your AI rivals, simply handed OpenAI—and your entire AI business—an enormous present. To not point out the advert enterprise.
An advert battle for the AI age
Not for the reason that days of Coke and Pepsi have we seen this type of ire slung at a class competitor. And I simply should say: I’m right here for it.
We’re at a pivotal time for AI improvement and adoption throughout enterprise and tradition, with points starting from mass layoffs to people using LLMs for dating advice. However AI can also be in its model infancy, with some platforms constructing large title recognition however little or no model picture.
There isn’t a higher class than AI to start out a full-on promoting battle in 2026, and there are not any two higher firms to wage it than Anthropic and OpenAI. Anthropic has lengthy framed its Claude platform as a extra refined LLM than its OpenAI counterpart. And its Tremendous Bowl advertisements are delivering an implicit message in regards to the competitors: You possibly can’t belief them.
Created by award-winning advert company Mom, the brand new Anthropic marketing campaign, “A Time and a Place,” has 4 spots in complete (two are big-game certain). “Individuals need an AI they will belief—one which’s centered solely on working for them. We wish Claude to be that alternative,” Andrew Stirk, Anthropic’s head of promoting, stated in a press release.
When OpenAI’s Altman opined on X that it’s “on model for Anthropic doublespeak to make use of a misleading advert to critique theoretical misleading advertisements that aren’t actual,” maybe he ought to flip that into a short for his growing all-star internal marketing team (think about a 1984-style ad for 2026). I imply, he even has Brandon McGraw, former head of shopper advertising at Anthropic, on the roster.
Similar story along with his second try at a clapback: “Extra Texans use ChatGPT free of charge than complete folks use Claude within the U.S., so we’ve a differently-shaped downside than they do.” What about an AI Problem advert set in El Paso or Brownsville the place they go full “Get a Mac” and paint Claude because the snooty also-ran to ChatGPT’s bot of the folks?
This consumer-facing dichotomy is the proper setup for an promoting battle. You’ve received two manufacturers providing ostensibly the identical factor (not less than to the common individual), simply with completely different positioning. However—as Coke and Pepsi demonstrated—despite the fact that manufacturers concerned in road fights like this do get a couple of ego bruises, traditionally the artistic arms race helps each emerge in a stronger place with their audiences.
Challenger recreation
The decades-long scrap between Coca-Cola and Pepsi is well-documented, however its dynamics have been replicated in numerous methods through the years in different product classes like tech, quick meals, and telecom.
There’s a typical anatomy to advert wars that cuts throughout industries. At their most simple, these campaigns at all times start with a challenger model calling out a a lot greater rival by title. For Pepsi, which started the cola wars with lower than 20% market share, that meant the Pepsi Problem—displaying actual folks selecting Pepsi over Coke in blind style assessments. This yr, it meant hijacking Coke’s familiar polar bear for the Super Bowl.
Apple’s “Get a Mac” is broadly thought of probably the greatest long-running promoting campaigns of all time. Apple was the challenger (for those who can consider that) depicting the dominant PC manufacturers (Microsoft Home windows) as uninteresting, cumbersome, and simply plain uncool.
In fact, the challenger model is within the eye of the beholder, and in 2011 it was Samsung mocking iPhone fanboys for lining as much as get what it deemed an inferior product.
Over in quick meals, Burger King had an award-winning run of labor within the late 2010s underneath then-CMO Fernando Machado, a lot of which straight concerned McDonald’s. To advertise the nonprofit Peace One Day, Burger King took out advertisements and constructed a whole web site proposing to McDonald’s that the rivals make peace to create the final word burger—the McWhopper. The advert had $220 million in earned media worth, and eight.9 billion impressions. In 2018, Burger King created print ads with photos of barbecue grills at former homes of ex-McDonald’s executives to spotlight the flame-grilled style of Whoppers.
That very same yr, it launched “Whopper Detour,” a promo marketing campaign that used geofencing to supply a 1-cent Whopper to customers who ordered by means of the Burger King app whereas inside 600 ft of a McDonald’s. It received 1.5 million Burger King app downloads in 9 days.
Even Taco Bell took a swing on the golden arches when it launched a breakfast menu in 2014. For its largest advertising marketing campaign ever as much as that time, Taco Bell recruited real guys named Ronald McDonald to testify to the tastiness of its Breakfast Crunchwrap.
Whether or not folks had been emotionally invested as a result of they liked considered one of these manufacturers over the opposite, or they had been simply there for the LOLs, every of those sparked two issues manufacturers crave completely—consideration and pleasure.
Strategic response
A 2025 INSEAD research known as “The Power of Strategic Rivalry” discovered {that a} well-managed rivalry can prolong the story between rivals, retaining customers tuned in longer and—importantly—benefiting each side with ongoing engagement and relevance. Individuals love a very good model struggle.
Coca-Cola maintained its lead all through the cola wars, however Pepsi’s market share shot up from 20% to a peak of 30%-plus within the Nineteen Nineties. And their advert struggle not solely helped improve general soda consumption from 12.4% of American beverage consumption in 1970 to 22.4% in 1985, however every model greater than doubled revenues over the Eighties. And due to the sheer depth and advert frequency throughout essentially the most heated years of their advert battle, the manufacturers elbowed their strategy to the middle of popular culture. Between 1975 and 1995, Coke’s annual advert spending went from about $25 million to $112 million, whereas Pepsi’s grew from $18 million to $82 million.
The haymakers from challenger manufacturers are to be anticipated. However hardly ever, if ever, do the larger manufacturers reply with the identical degree of chunk. In truth, essentially the most profitable responses have been investing in higher artistic model work finished extra usually.
McDonald’s didn’t use its world domination to swipe down at Burger King. As an alternative it invested in and celebrated its present followers in enjoyable and distinctive methods. Particularly, with the Well-known Orders work that started with Travis Scott in 2020 and expanded to collaborators as various as Mariah Carey, BTS, and Cactus Plant Flea Market, driving record app usage, hundreds of millions in sales, and making new followers of youthful prospects.
OpenAI seems to be taking an identical tack in its promoting, not less than thus far. The model is specializing in how its instruments can encourage and allow folks to construct new issues. Its three regional Super Bowl spots are about how three completely different American small companies—a seed farm, a steel salvage yard, and a family-run tamale store—are using ChatGPT to develop and thrive.
OpenAI CMO Kate Rouch admits the Anthropic spots are humorous, however since advertisements haven’t landed in ChatGPT but, it’s an entire fabrication of what that have will probably be like. Once I spoke to her this week, she took difficulty with the spots calling OpenAI’s use of promoting to help free entry to the instruments as a “violation,” and reiterated Altman’s level that ChatGPT has extra free month-to-month customers in Texas than Anthropic has globally.
“And our perspective is that open, free entry to this know-how will allow particular person folks to construct issues that can profit them and us all,” Rouch instructed me. “It actually all comes right down to self-empowerment and having the ability to do issues that you simply both didn’t consider you would do earlier than otherwise you really couldn’t do earlier than. And that’s the entire recreation.”
It is a extra sound technique, each general and in mild of Anthropic’s trolling, than final yr’s animated Tremendous Bowl advert that had many individuals guessing simply what the hell it was attempting to say.
If that is the daybreak of AI’s model of the cola wars—and I hope it’s—it’s a formidable begin for each manufacturers.
Anthropic’s challenger technique right here hits, not only for the cojones to step as much as the Tremendous Bowl in opposition to a a lot greater rival. The important thing to any challenger swipe that truly works hinges on its artistic execution, and these spots avoid the slop to serve up a bona fide chef’s kiss.
For OpenAI, creatively telling actual tales about actual folks utilizing its instruments to resolve actual issues and construct actual issues seems to be much less like an promoting road struggle and extra like a flip for the excessive street towards the model picture promised land.
