OpenAI's Influencer Trip Backfired. Here Is What the Best CMO's Do Instead.
OpenAI hosted approximately 30 influencers at Wildflower Farms, a luxury resort in New York's Hudson Valley, for a two-day retreat it called Summer Club. The event included farm-to-table dinners, beekeeping, and painting workshops alongside classes on ChatGPT Work.
Creators posted from the retreat across Instagram and TikTok. As reported by The Verge, the comments were not lighthearted. One influencer was sarcastically encouraged to do a get-ready-with-me video touring a data center. Another deleted her video entirely. Some of the reaction videos criticizing the trip generated more attention than the original posts.
OpenAI said the event was education-led: "Creators are an important part of our community and how people get information and learn about our products today." The gap between that framing and the public-facing content was the problem. What audiences saw was merely a luxury brand trip.
The episode landed in the same week Later published findings from its CMO Circle, an invite-only gathering of marketing leaders from brands including Fidelity, Dunkin', Solo Brands, Habit Burger, and Alibaba.com. The contrast is instructive. Across two days of conversation, four themes kept surfacing from brands running creator programmes that are actually performing.
Brand love has moved from a tone preference to a hard selection filter. Bret Clancy, VP of Social Media at Fidelity, made the point that getting creator selection wrong doesn't just underperform; it can damage the brand. For financial services brands specifically, that risk is compounded by the trust and compliance considerations that govern what can be said, by whom, and in what context. Getting it right means finding someone whose relationship with the product is so real that a brief couldn't have manufactured it.
The transactional model is giving way to creative collaboration. 81% of creators report they perform best when given light guidelines and creative flexibility, and 38% cite loss of creative freedom as the top reason a collaboration fails. Alibaba.com's head of marketing, Rah Mahtani, described the shift as moving away from using influencers as another channel for reach toward building long-term relationships in which creators shape the work.
Small stories outperform big ones. Habit Burger CMO Jack Hinchliffe: "It's little stories, it's authenticity, it's about human connections and human moments." Nano and micro-influencers achieve roughly double the sales conversion rate of macro-influencers, maintaining a 4-8% engagement rate compared to the 1-2% average of creators with 100K+ followers.
Treating creators as media placements rather than creative partners is the pattern the CMO Circle identified as the underlying failure mode, and the OpenAI trip is the clearest recent example of what that looks like in practice.
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