OpenAI underscored the urgency of its enterprise-level ambitions this week by hiring Colin Fleming as chief marketing officer for business, The WSJ Leadership Institute’s Patrick Coffee writes for the newsletter:

Fleming’s newly created role comes as the maker of ChatGPT is in the thick of a race to win more big corporate clients. Its key selling point is Codex, the tool that writes code semi-autonomously in order to help large businesses develop complex software products.

Rival AI power Anthropic has pulled ahead by focusing from the outset on business clients and engineers rather than consumers, according to some analysts.

ChatGPT still counts far more individual users than Anthropic’s chatbot Claude. But Anthropic had the lead among corporate users in a report last July by the venture-capital firm Menlo Ventures, an Anthropic investor, and nearly twice the market share for coding.

OpenAI is well aware of this challenge. Earlier this year it pivoted to enterprise and coding operations, abandoning side projects like video-generating app Sora in the process, and made Codex the star of a Super Bowl commercial. The company announced in April that Codex had hit four million monthly active users, up from more than two million in March thanks in part to the work of consultancies hired to help sell the product.

Fleming’s hire will presumably super-charge that effort.

OpenAI’s newest marketing leader will report to Chief Revenue Officer Denise Dresser.

Fleming joins the company from software firm ServiceNow, where he was executive vice president and CMO. He previously spent more than a decade at Salesforce, rising to executive vice president of global marketing by doing the very thing OpenAI would like him to do now—marketing to other business executives.

“This next chapter is going to move fast,” Fleming wrote on LinkedIn.

Yesterday we dove into the creator-marketing and clipping strategies driving two prominent political campaigns in California. Today we have an exclusive early look at this year’s political ad spending. It suggests that nonpolitical marketers with plans for the fall might want to lock in their inventory now.

This will be the first nonpresidential campaign cycle in which U.S. political advertising tops $10 billion, according to a forecast set to be released Wednesday by the research firm Emarketer.

U.S. political ad spending will grow to $11.07 billion this year, up more than 20% from $9.11 billion in 2022, the most recent midterm cycle, Emarketer said.

“Gone are the days when the midterms would see significant drop-offs: Total spending will only be about 5% less than it was in 2024,” Emarketer analyst Ethan Cramer-Flood said in the forecast.

Digital political ad spending will rise more than 85% from 2022 but remain a relatively small piece at just $3.84 billion. Social networks in particular will attract just $765 million from campaigns.

That’s partly because campaigns have learned that they can get a lot of traction on social media without directly paying the platforms, Cramer-Flood said. The Emarketer estimates don’t include payments to creators and clippers of the sort we discussed yesterday in the cases of Tom Steyer and Spencer Pratt.

Political ads on connected TV meanwhile will surge to $2.34 billion from $790 million in 2022.

Starbucks shares fell 2% Tuesday amid continuing outrage over a promotion misfire and threatened boycotts in South Korea, one of the chain’s biggest markets.

The company’s South Korean licensee last week ran a “Tank Day” marketing campaign, offering discounts on the company’s “Tank” tumbler series, Heather Haddon writes for The Wall Street Journal.

The promotion coincided with the anniversary of a 1980 massacre in South Korea, when the country’s military deployed soldiers in tanks to crush a demonstration, killing protesters.

Critics lambasted the chain for a move that seemed insensitive to a national tragedy. Starbucks Korea said it is investigating and holding accountable those who were involved, while establishing more rigorous ethical standards.

Chung Yong-jin, chairman of Shinsegae Group, Starbucks’ Korea licensee, apologized on Tuesday for a second time and asked for forgiveness.

Korea is Starbucks’s third-biggest market by locations after the U.S. and China, and was the launchpad for the viral glass Bearista promotion that took off in the U.S. last year.

The community where marketing leaders drop the corporate speak and share what’s actually happening. The WSJ CMO Council unites leaders from the world’s most influential brands including Adobe, Audi, Google, IBM, Intel, Johnson & Johnson, Meta, Taco Bell, P&G and Verizon.

Tap into the connections and WSJ intelligence that move careers forward and separate the prepared from the scrambling.

Request Information

Phoenix built an empire of customer-service call centers. AI is coming to tear it down. [WSJ]

Robinhood is introducing a feature that lets customers hand their trading and credit-card purchasing decisions to their favorite AI tools. [WSJ] 

Oreo’s collaboration with BTS includes 13 different designs, purple cookies and filling that tastes like hotteok, a brown-sugar pancake sold in Korea. [People] 

Bath & Body Works reported another decline in quarterly sales as the company overhauls its strategy in an attempt to return to growth. [WSJ] 

Banana Boat’s first ad campaign in five years instructs consumers to get outside immediately. [Retail Brew]

Self-described tanfluencers are encouraging Gen Z “tanmaxxing” and spreading misinformation about sunscreen. [NYT]

The launch of Ferrari’s $640,000 EV quickly erupted into a storm about its looks. [WSJ]