OpenArt AI Begins Theater and Billboard Ads in Three Cities to Promote Its Director Video Tool

OpenArt AI is launching advertisements in AMC movie theaters in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York this week to promote its Director product, Business Insider reported. The campaign also includes billboards in the same cities along with digital and social placements.

Director allows users to describe an idea, visual style, and narrative arc in conversational language and generates videos up to five minutes long.

The entire campaign was produced in-house by OpenArt AI using the tool. An in-house studio of six creative directors spent four days developing concepts and held a movie-night screening marathon to select the final spot. The ad shows a man eating a hot dog on a bench beside a basketball court.

A coach character approaches, blows a whistle, and holds a laptop. The man says he has always wanted to make a movie about a penguin in the desert. The coach types the idea into OpenArt and states he can create any video, even a micro drama.

The man replies that he does not watch micro dramas. OpenArt AI was founded in 2022 by two former Googlers and reports 8 million monthly active users. In January the company raised a $30 million Series A round led by Canaan Partners.

Its budget for the Director marketing campaign is in the low hundreds of thousands of dollars. A survey published in January by the IAB and Sonata Insights found that 30 percent of Gen Z respondents described brands using AI in ads as inauthentic, 26 percent as disconnected, and 24 percent as unethical.

Stella Guan, head of growth and operations at OpenArt AI, said the placement targets an audience already interested in film and that the campaign aims to demonstrate higher-quality AI output suitable for cinema screens.