If it actually was spent on ads, it seems to me OpenAI would have to be one of the single biggest ad buyers in the world. Almost certainly they are using a somewhat broad definition of sales and marketing to cram a bunch of expenses into it to make some other category look better.
I've easily gotten (low) hundreds of OpenAI youtube ads. More recently they've been pushing 'Free OpenAI Image generation' to me, in the past they pushed Codex more, but I have a sub for that now, so I guess it works.
