OpenArt/LinkedIn, Scott Larson
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Salesforce and Meta marketing alum Scott Larson says OpenArt AI's conversational text-to-video generator is the tool he wished he'd had earlier in his career.
The platform helps whizz up short videos, arty images, and music by typing in a few prompts.
OpenArt this week tapped Larson as the company's vice president of brand marketing, the company exclusively told CMO Insider.
He joins in a period of rapid growth for the company, which said it's on track to pass $250 million in annual recurring revenue by the end of 2026. It's increased its head count to 80 employees over the past year, up from 20, and grown to 8 million monthly users, the company said.
Larson told CMO Insider he's on a mission to make OpenArt "as close to a household name as a creative AI can be."
He said the biggest challenge will be to wrap all of OpenArt's different use cases into a single "North Star" story.
It recently launched a new product called Director that lets users describe an idea, visual style, and narrative arc, which it then turns into videos up to 5 minutes long. It promoted the launch with a cinema and billboard campaign that it hoped would spark a "vibe directing" craze among the creative community. Others use its platform to create social posts, AI voiceovers, or lyric videos. It also offers an AI model leaderboard to help its users benchmark different AI video and image models.
Larson previously worked at advertising agencies on large consumer brands such as Nike, Levi's, and Gatorade. He later became global executive creative director at Meta, then known as Facebook. Larson went on to be an SVP at Salesforce, where he helped shape the branding behind its annual Dreamforce conference and launched ad campaigns starring Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson.
Larson first experimented with OpenArt two months ago, creating a very short film with three cuts. Called "Life is Short," it shows a man made out of a stick of butter walking alongside a swimming pool. The butter man looks up at the scorching sun above before the video cuts to an old-school title card saying "The End."
"Had I had this tool starting back when I was a little creative junkie up until today, I'd be making everything all the time," Larson said.
Earlier this year, OpenArt plucked another exec from Big Tech, hiring former Google executive Raj Gajwani as its chief business officer.