Head of SMB Ads Marketing

ABOUT THE TEAM OpenAI’s mission is to ensure the responsible and widespread adoption of artificial intelligence. In support of that mission, the Marketing team helps deeply understand customer audiences and market dynamics, influence the development of the right products, build sustainable and customer-aligned monetization models, and drive awareness, adoption, and usage across OpenAI’s products and platform. We take a data-driven approach to understand markets, develop monetization strategies, and uncover customer needs that shape product strategy and messaging. We partner closely with Sales, Partnerships, Product, Engineering, Research, Comms, and Design to deliver a cohesive end-to-end customer experience and lead go-to-market efforts for new product launches across channels. ABOUT THE ROLE We are hiring a Head of SMB Ads Marketing to define and scale OpenAI’s marketing strategy for small and medium-sized business advertisers globally. This leader will own how SMBs discover, evaluate, adopt, and grow with OpenAI’s advertising platform. This is a highly strategic and hands-on leadership role at the intersection of product marketing, growth marketing, demand generation, lifecycle marketing, and sales enablement. You will build the SMB advertiser growth engine from the ground up—developing segmentation, positioning, onboarding journeys, education programs, partner programs (including agencies), acquisition campaigns, treatments and retention strategies that help millions of businesses unlock value through OpenAI’s self-service ads platform. You will partner closely with Product, Sales, Partnerships, Growth, Finance, Data Science, and Operations to create a durable SMB business that scales efficiently while maintaining a high-quality advertiser and user experience. This role is ideally based in San Francisco, CA, with a hybrid schedule of three days per week in the office. IN THIS ROLE, YOU WILL: - Define the end-to-end SMB advertiser marketing strategy across acquisition, activation, retention, expansion, and advocacy for OpenAI’s self-service ads platform. - Build the SMB advertiser segmentation framework, identifying priority audiences by business size, industry, sophistication, geography, and growth potential. - Develop positioning and messaging that translates OpenAI’s advertising products and self-service tools into clear, compelling business outcomes for SMB owners, operators, and marketers. - Lead self-serve growth initiatives that drive advertiser sign-ups, onboarding completion, first campaign launch, repeat spend, and long-term platform adoption. - Create scalable lifecycle marketing programs across email, in-product surfaces, education, webinars, and community channels. - Partner with Product teams to improve advertiser onboarding flows, campaign creation tools, billing journeys, reporting dashboards, and measurement UX. - Build demand generation programs across paid, owned, and partner channels (including agencies) to efficiently grow the SMB advertiser base. - Develop educational content and thought leadership that helps SMBs learn modern AI-powered marketing best practices and become successful advertisers on the platform. - Establish retention and reactivation strategies that improve cohort health, advertiser ROI, and long-term spend growth. - Develop an approach to define when and how higher-value SMBs transition from self-service to assisted or managed motions. - Build scaled assisted SMB management and upsell motions - Own core funnel metrics including CAC, activation rate, time-to-first-campaign, repeat advertiser rate, retention, and LTV/CAC efficiency. - Provide customer insight and market feedback to inform roadmap priorities for self-service ad products, tooling, automation, and measurement. - Hire and lead a high-performing team across disciplines over time. YOU MIGHT THRIVE IN THIS ROLE IF YOU: - Have 12+ years of experience in growth marketing, product marketing, performance marketing, or SMB go-to-market leadership. - Have built or scaled SMB self-service advertising ecosystems at companies such as Google Ads, Meta, Amazon Ads, Shopify, Intuit, Square, HubSpot, Yelp, TikTok, or similar platforms. - Deeply understand SMB customer behavior, including acquisition economics, self-serve funnels, onboarding friction, and retention dynamics. - Have experience marketing self-service SaaS or advertising platforms where ease of use, conversion, and retention are critical. - Have strong product instincts and can partner closely with PMs and engineers to improve conversion and user experience. - Are fluent in performance marketing concepts including campaign setup, targeting, bidding, attribution, and ROI measurement. - Have experience leading lifecycle marketing and CRM programs at scale. - Are highly analytical and comfortable using experimentation, funnel analysis, and cohort modeling to drive decisions. - Can simp