ChatGPT vs Claude

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ChatGPT and Claude both recently launched their first-ever brand campaigns. Not product demos or feature announcements, actual brand campaigns with cinematic footage, music and emotional storytelling.

After years of competing on benchmarks like who has the longest context window, the fastest inference time, the best reasoning capabilities, they've both suddenly pivoted to selling feelings instead of features.

The timing isn't coincidental. AI is crossing a threshold. It's moved beyond tech-y early adopters and entered the messy territory of mass-market adoption, where emotional connection matters more than capability.

One campaign positions AI as your everyday assistant making mundane tasks easier. The other positions it as your thinking partner for meaningful challenges.

Let me show you what I mean.

One ad opens with a young man doing pull-ups in a park at sunset. The camera pulls back. Text appears like movie credits: "I want to feel stronger, help me do some pull-ups by autumn". ChatGPT's response scrolls up the screen, laying out a workout plan.

The whole thing is shot on 35mm film. It looks more like an indie film festival entry than a tech commercial.

OpenAI's Head of Marketing said "we want to showcase how ChatGPT can make your life easier and help you do more of what matters to you".

Better search. Better answers. Everyday utility.

It's positioning itself as Google 2.0.

The emotion they're selling is accessible productivity. Making AI feel normal, unthreatening, useful for mundane tasks anyone might encounter.

This is a big shift from their Super Bowl ad, which cost roughly $14 million and positioned ChatGPT alongside fire, the wheel, space exploration. Critics said it felt distant and abstract. It failed to connect AI to everyday life in ways that felt accessible.

When you've already achieved that level of ubiquity, you don't need to convince people AI is transformative. You need to convince them to use your AI for everything. Make it so normal, so integrated into daily routines, that it becomes the default choice.

Like Google is for search.

But here's the problem with that approach.

When System1 tested ChatGPT's ads with U.S. consumers, only 59% of viewers could identify what was being advertised. That's catastrophically bad. The logo appears too late. The distinctive assets are underused. The ad is so generic it could be selling any AI tool.

Most people don't distinguish between AI providers anyway. They see ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot as interchangeable. When distinctiveness matters most, ChatGPT created ads that blend into the background.

Claude's campaign starts with a voiceover: "there's never been a worse time". Images of various problems flash across the screen.

Then it flips.

"There's never been a better time to have a problem."

The timing was deliberate. Just months earlier, OpenAI launched Sora, their text-to-video tool. Suddenly anyone could generate video content at scale, resulting in a flood of low-effort, algorithm-chasing "slop".

Anthropic saw their opening. While everyone else celebrated automation, they'd position hard against it. Their "Keep Thinking" campaign became explicitly anti-slop. Against AI-generated garbage. For actual human thinking.

The contrast was perfect. While competitors do everything for you, Claude amplifies your own thinking.

We see hardware being assembled, notes being sketched, people working with their hands while building something meaningful. Anthropic's Head of Brand said it's "for those who see AI not as a shortcut, but as a thinking partner for your most meaningful challenges".

This is contradictory positioning to OpenAI's.

The emotion they're selling is transformative ambition. Making AI feel like it amplifies your capability to tackle genuinely hard problems.

Claude recently ran a cafe pop-up in New York, which had over 5,000 people visit across a single weekend. One founder drove ten hours from Ohio just to experience it.

You've seen corporate swag before. Logo-plastered shirts that go straight to the back of the drawer. Branded water bottles that signal "I attended a conference once".

The thinking cap is different. It doesn't broadcast Claude. It broadcasts you.

When someone sees that hat, they're not thinking about AI tools. They're thinking: here's someone who cares about depth over speed. Someone who builds real things instead of churning out content. Someone in the anti-slop tribe.

That's why people drove ten hours and waited in lines around the block. The cap isn't merchandise. It's a badge that says "I'm one of you."

Claude has 16-19 million monthly users. Much smaller scale than ChatGPT.

But look at how those users engage. 36% of usage is coding. 77% of enterprise usage is automation. 70-75% of revenue comes from high-value API calls rather than consumer subscriptions.

When you can't compete on scale, you compete on intensity. You build strong believers in a specific tribe rather than accumulating passive users.

The campaign essentially says: you're not looking for easier answers. You're looking for better questions, and we'll help you think through them.

This is dramatically different from Claude's earlier marketing attempts. Previous ads leaned on taglines like "Move your work up and to the Claude" (what ??).

The pivot to "Keep Thinking" represents Anthropic learning that, in a maturing category, technical superiority doesn't matter if you can't make people feel something.

Both companies abandoned the language of benchmarks and specifications in favour of something more powerful.

Identity and aspiration.

Here's where the strategies diverge completely.

Both companies needed to address mass-market fears about AI replacing humans. They took opposite approaches.

ChatGPT's bet: win the everyday productivity category.

Be the AI everyone uses for routine tasks. Build a moat through ubiquity and mental availability. If you become the default choice for "I need help with something", you win through volume.

It's the Google model. Be so ubiquitous you become the verb. When people say "just ChatGPT it" you've won.

They pursue normalisation through mundanity. Make AI feel so ordinary and helpful it becomes non-threatening. Position it as a tool for tasks you already do, just easier.

Show regular people achieving small wins, cooking meals, planning trips, hitting fitness goals.

This works because if AI helps you cook dinner and plan trips, it's not scary. It's helpful.

But the tradeoff is huge, positioning AI as "nice to have" rather than transformative.

Claude's bet: win the serious work category.

Be the AI that ambitious people identify with. Build a moat through tribal identity and aspiration. If you're the tool that "real builders" use, you win through emotional intensity.

It's the Apple model. Premium positioning through aspiration. You don't need everyone. You need the people who define themselves by their work to see you as essential.

Not to mention the obvious similarities between this "Keep Thinking" campaign from Claude and Apple's own famous "Think Different" campaign.

Claude reframes AI anxieties through empowerment. They acknowledge problems exist, but reframe AI as the solution rather than the threat. It's a partner that makes you more capable, not a replacement for your capabilities.

Both campaigns emphasise craft in how they were made. Shot on 35mm film. Traditional cinematography. Human creativity throughout.

This isn't accidental. It's addressing anxiety through demonstration. The meta-message is that this is how you should use AI too. As an amplifier, not a replacement.

Claude's campaign is objectively better. Not just emotionally, but strategically, creatively, and from a basic branding perspective.

Research firm System1 tested ChatGPT’s ads and found they scored in the lowest quintile for both long-term growth and short-term sales impact.

The problem is ChatGPT waited until the final seconds to show their logo. They assumed a single stamp of branding at the end would be enough.

Every element of Claude’s campaign is distinctive from frame one. You know it's Claude immediately, not because they plaster their logo everywhere, but because the entire aesthetic, message and positioning is unmistakably theirs.

This matters more than ever in AI, because most people can't tell AI providers apart. Research from Menlo Ventures found that "most people don't distinguish between older assistants like Alexa and Siri and newer large language models like ChatGPT and Claude". Technical capabilities have reached rough parity. Sure, one model might be slightly better at reasoning while another excels at creative tasks. But for most users, the differences are marginal at best.

When everything's a gray AI bucket, you need distinctive assets that make you immediately recognisable. Not just a logo at the end. Elements throughout that telegraph "this is us" before viewers even see your name.

ChatGPT's pull-up ad could be selling any AI tool. Swap the final logo and it works for Gemini, Copilot, or whatever new one launches tomorrow.

Claude's "Keep Thinking" campaign couldn't be anyone else's. The anti-slop positioning. The thinking caps. The cafe pop-up. The entire aesthetic. You'd recognise it as Claude even without the logo.

That's the difference between making ads and building a brand.

ChatGPT builds a transactional relationship: "I use this to get things done". Claude builds a transformational one: "this changes what I'm capable of".

When you can't compete on capability, you compete on distinctiveness. Who comes to mind first? Who do people actually remember? Who becomes part of someone's identity rather than just a tool they use?

ChatGPT might answer those questions through sheer ubiquity. Claude is answering them through brand building.

ChatGPT has the usage numbers, but when your ads fail basic branding principles you're not building on that advantage. You're coasting on product momentum while doing nothing to create lasting brand equity.

Claude is building something more defensible. Tribal identity. Distinctive positioning. Brand assets that people recognise instantly and want to be associated with.

In a world where AI capabilities will continue to operate in relative parity, that's the only sustainable advantage.

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