When OpenAI hires humans: inside Tower 28’s playbook for the post-scale agency era

Their background at TBWA Media Arts Labs – working on accounts such as Apple – led them to believe the traditional holdco model was ill-prepared for a world where clients were demanding agile, always-on service.

Instead of a vast bench of salaried talent, they built a lean global core that snaps into an on-call circle of in-market specialists – creative directors, producers, writers and cultural insiders who actually live where the work will run. “We wanted Apple-level people in every market we cared about,” says Cross. “That was our hiring filter from day one.”

That hunch has since become a business with around 20 full-time staff, a global freelance community of more than 2,000 creatives and a projected $10m in annual fees – proof that you don’t need a skyscraper to run a global network. The result is a model that looks less like a traditional agency and more like a film studio’s production slate: assemble the dream team, shoot, ship, dissolve, repeat.

The OpenAI engagement makes the case in one stroke. The briefs come fast, products update fast and the stakes are unforgiving. “A lot is reactionary to product,” Toerner says. “We might get a brief a month, but there are pushes in between. The cadence is intense.” In practice, that means Tower 28’s core team mirrors OpenAI’s core team, with regional leads pulling in the right people in the right country at the right moment. “Clients love that we build the ship around them rather than forcing them into our ship,” Cross says. It sounds small. It’s actually radical. The holding company orthodoxy was built on scale economics; Tower 28 competes on orchestration.

Because overhead is low, Tower 28 prices sharply (Toerner notes that it came in roughly 20% lower than major rivals to win Expedia’s localization account), and because the network “follows the sun,” it moves at the speed of culture. “We can be on set and hear that a roller rink reference won’t fly in Tokyo and, within minutes, a local creative director is on the call saying, ‘That’s not how it looks here. Try this…’” Toerner says. “Clients stop fearing global. They start seeing it as jet fuel.”

None of this works if you treat localization like a glorified spellcheck. Tower 28 insists on transcreation – protecting intent while changing expression so it resonates locally. That’s where its internal tech (affectionately named Gail) earns its keep. “Gail is a guardrail,” Cross says. “She’ll tell you, ‘Don’t post this – you’re about to offend all of Germany.’ But she’s not the final word. Humans are.” Toerner is blunter: “AI gives you the middle case. Culture lives at the edges. That’s where you get hurt if you don’t have people with instinct.”

The OpenAI proof point also reframes the industry’s favorite anxiety. If the patron saint of automation still needs human translators, perhaps the question isn’t ‘will AI replace agencies?’ but ‘which agencies can work with AI without losing their edge?’ Cross argues that the legacy model – big buildings, bigger payrolls – has lost its natural advantage. “We’re the speedboat in a sea of barges,” she says. “When there are 27 layers between the idea and the market, the market moves without you.” Toerner adds the boardroom subtext: “If you’re beholden to shareholders, the easiest way to show profit is cutting staff. Then work ebbs, you hire them back and the culture gets whiplash. Our network avoids that.”

What makes Tower 28’s rise more than a novelty is the client mix and the direction of travel. It began expecting mid-market briefs from brands without global reach. Instead, the majors called. Google leaned on it for its summer Pixel push. Expedia Group (Expedia, Vrbo, Hotels.com) named it its localization agency of record. Just Eat Takeaway tapped it to help carry a creative idea across borders after the incumbent’s initial rollout. And with OpenAI, the scope is widening: parts of the brief now include market-originated creative, not just transcreation. “Some clients are asking for local Swat teams to originate work,” Toerner says. “That’s where this is going.”

There’s a quiet, slightly subversive generosity to how Tower 28 fits into the ecosystem. It competes for brand retainers, yes, but it also helps agencies pitch and deliver global work they’d otherwise avoid. “We love co-pitching,” Cross says. “We plug into their process, set up the workflows and make sure they can scale without breaking the bank. The CFO doesn’t see a bench sitting idle; the CMO sees campaigns that respect culture.”

All of which brings us back to the OpenAI headline, because it explains why this story matters now. You can feel the industry tightening its belt. Forecasts of double-digit job losses are now table talk. Return-to-office edicts bump up against a workforce that discovered – and largely prefers – hybrid. The old “beholden” model (‘Use whoever sits in our office in market X’) makes less sense in a world where the best person might be two time zones away and available on Tuesday. The holding groups know it; some are buying small global shops to rebadge as “modern,” but Cross is skeptical: “Buying agencies in different countries isn’t the same as running a 24-hour machine with the right processes. Without that, you’re still slower than the market.”

OpenAI’s decision to hire Tower 28 won’t end the debate about automation and creativity. But it does settle one thing. Even the most advanced AI can’t see around a cultural corner, can’t sense the word that carries the wrong connotation in Seoul, can’t feel when a roller rink gag will clang in Tokyo. People can. “There will always need to be people with good taste,” Toerner says. “AI doesn’t have that.”

The future, then, may look less like a palace of permanent staff and more like a studio – a core that assembles the right cast at the right moment and ships the work before the moment moves on. On Santa Monica Beach, that was just a hunch. In 2025, it’s a business model and one of the most arresting facts in advertising: even OpenAI needs human intelligence.