OpenArt AI is pitching ‘vibe directing’ as the next creative movement for everyday users, launching ads in AMC movie theatres across Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York this week alongside billboards and digital placements in those cities.
The campaign promotes Director, the company’s text-to-video product, which lets users describe an idea, visual style, and narrative arc in plain language and generates videos up to five minutes long. OpenArt AI made the announcement exclusively to Business Insider’s CMO Insider newsletter.
OpenArt AI’s Vibe Directing Pitch Lands in Cinemas
The company says it hopes the push will spark a wave of ‘vibe directing’ among newcomers to video creation, drawing a deliberate parallel to ‘vibe coding,’ the trend in which non-programmers build software by describing what they want to an AI model.
Stella Guan, head of growth and operations at OpenArt AI, told Business Insider: ‘I don’t think we’re trying to be provocative, but it’s just that we think the audience is a really good fit,’ when asked whether targeting cinemagoers was designed to antagonise Hollywood’s creative community.
The ad itself was created entirely in-house. A studio of six creative directors spent four days generating ideas using the Director product, and the company held a screening marathon before selecting the final spot. The ad’s budget is in the ‘low hundreds of thousands’ of dollars, the company said.
The creative depicts a man eating a hot dog beside a basketball court. A ‘coach’ character arrives, laptop in hand, and tells him he can make any video he wants, including a ‘micro drama,’ to which the man replies: ‘I don’t watch micro dramas.’
Revenue Growth and the Funding Picture
Founded in 2022 by two former Google employees, OpenArt AI says it has reached 8 million monthly active users. The company raised a $30 million Series A led by Canaan Partners in January, with Basis Set Ventures and DCM Ventures also participating, according to The SaaS News.
That round followed a $5 million seed in 2023, also backed by Basis Set and DCM, bringing total funding to approximately $35 million, according to Sacra. Sacra also estimates the company reached $70 million in annualised revenue in 2025, up from $10.5 million at the end of 2024, roughly a 7x increase, with the business described as profitable and generating approximately $3.5 million in revenue per employee across a team of around 20 people.
Canaan, writing on its own site about why it led the Series A, argued that creators on the platform return repeatedly to develop characters and evolve narratives over time, and stated that the next generation of media franchises ‘won’t start in Hollywood’ but on AI-native platforms.
Newcomer reports that Basis Set’s Lan Xuezhao led the original seed investment after co-founder Coco Mao picked her up from San Francisco airport and pitched the company during the drive to Xuezhao’s next meeting.
The Consumer Scepticism OpenArt Has to Overcome
Placing an AI-generated campaign in cinemas is a direct challenge to consumer wariness about the technology. A survey by the IAB and Sonata Insights, conducted between October 2025 and January 2026 among 505 US Gen Z and Millennial consumers and 104 ad industry executives, found that 39% of Gen Z respondents express negative sentiment toward AI-generated ads, nearly double the 20% of Millennials who feel the same way.
The same report found that 82% of ad executives believe Gen Z and Millennial consumers feel positive about AI-generated ads, against only 45% of consumers who actually feel that way: a perception gap that widened from 32 points in 2024 to 37 points in the latest survey period.
Despite that gap, industry adoption is accelerating. The IAB/Sonata Insights report found 83% of ad executives now use AI in the creative process, up from 60% in 2024, and that 86% of buyers are using or planning to use generative AI to build video ad creative.
James Poulter, chief executive of AI consultancy ThreePoint Labs, raised a separate concern about platform claims. ‘All of the models are overselling how easy it is to create the top 1% of excellent,’ he said. ‘No matter how capable the models are of creating cinematic things out of the box, if you don’t have the language of cinema or being a director, you cannot steer the model to deliver something akin to someone who does have that language.’
Guan, for her part, argued that much of the criticism reflects a lack of awareness of how far the technology has progressed. ‘I think that by itself is a great showcase of our product’s capability as well as of the technology,’ she said of the cinema placement.
Whether cinemagoers in Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco agree will be the first real test of whether ‘vibe directing’ travels beyond the startup pitch deck.