In its first major brand campaign under chief marketing officer (CMO) Kate Rouch, OpenAI is getting in front of college students ahead of final exams.
On Thursday (April 3), Rouch announced on LinkedIn that ChatGPT Plus is free for college students through May—an incentive meant to empower young people to use AI while marking its “first scaled marketing campaign.”
“The campaign shows students different ways to take advantage of ChatGPT as they study, work out, try to land jobs, and plan their summers,” Rouch wrote. “It also offers ChatGPT Plus’ more advanced capabilities to students for free through their finals.”
She added that creative supporting the effort will be distributed across “billboards, digital ads, podcasts, and more throughout the coming weeks.”
The two-month offer gives eligible college students in the U.S. and Canada access to increased file uploads, expanded messaging limits, advanced voice mode, deep research, and more. Students can claim free access to ChatGPT Plus from March 31 to May 31.
OpenAI’s education push
OpenAI’s new campaign expands its recent foray in academia.
After successfully partnering with universities like University of Oxford and University of Pennsylvania for ChatGPT Enterprise, the company introduced ChatGPT Edu last May, which is “built for universities to responsibly deploy AI to students, faculty, researchers, and campus operations,” per its site.
Rouch joined OpenAI as its first CMO in December to oversee marketing ChatGPT to consumers and enterprise audiences. In February, she led the company’s first rebrand and its Super Bowl debut, a pointillism-style ad created with Accenture Song that cost $14 million.
Accenture Song did not respond to a request for a comment about whether it is also behind this latest campaign from OpenAI in time for publication.
