Head of SMB Ads Marketing

OpenAI•San Francisco, CA

1d•Hybrid

About The Position

OpenAI is seeking a Head of SMB Ads Marketing to define and scale its marketing strategy for small and medium-sized business advertisers globally. This leadership role will be responsible for how SMBs discover, evaluate, adopt, and grow with OpenAI’s advertising platform. The position is a strategic and hands-on leadership role that combines product marketing, growth marketing, demand generation, lifecycle marketing, and sales enablement. The individual 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 to help businesses unlock value through OpenAI’s self-service ads platform. This role requires close collaboration with Product, Sales, Partnerships, Growth, Finance, Data Science, and Operations to create a scalable and efficient SMB business while maintaining a high-quality advertiser and user experience. The role is ideally based in San Francisco, CA, with a hybrid schedule of three days per week in the office.

Requirements

12+ years of experience in growth marketing, product marketing, performance marketing, or SMB go-to-market leadership.
Experience building or scaling SMB self-service advertising ecosystems at companies such as Google Ads, Meta, Amazon Ads, Shopify, Intuit, Square, HubSpot, Yelp, TikTok, or similar platforms.
Deep understanding of SMB customer behavior, including acquisition economics, self-serve funnels, onboarding friction, and retention dynamics.
Experience marketing self-service SaaS or advertising platforms where ease of use, conversion, and retention are critical.
Strong product instincts and ability to partner closely with PMs and engineers to improve conversion and user experience.
Fluency in performance marketing concepts including campaign setup, targeting, bidding, attribution, and ROI measurement.
Experience leading lifecycle marketing and CRM programs at scale.
Highly analytical and comfortable using experimentation, funnel analysis, and cohort modeling to drive decisions.
Ability to simplify complex advertising products into clear narratives for non-expert business owners.
Experience thriving in ambiguous, fast-moving environments where building new functions from scratch is required.
Excellent people leadership skills, with the ability to attract top talent and raise the quality bar quickly.

Responsibilities

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.