The advertising industry has spent the better part of a century trying to figure out how to talk to consumers. Now some marketers are wondering whether they should be talking to the machines instead.
Brands have begun experimenting with placing advertisements that appear in responses from ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence chatbot from OpenAI, with Amazon emerging as one avenue through which such purchases can be made. The development represents an early, and by most accounts highly tentative, parsing of what may eventually become a new category of media spending — or may not.
The channel, if it can be called that, remains in a nascent state that would be generous to describe as experimental. Measurement is murky at best, the rules governing what appears and when remain unsettled, and the number of ways to actually buy such placements is limited. Marketers who have dipped a toe into the water describe it less as a strategic initiative than as a reconnaissance mission.
(Whether the robots will appreciate being advertised to is a question that copywriters have not yet had to consider, though one imagines the strategy decks are being prepared.)
For Amazon, which has spent years building an advertising business that now rivals those of the traditional digital giants, the opportunity to serve as an intermediary for AI-directed marketing represents a natural extension of its ambitions. The company has made no secret of its desire to be present wherever commercial intent manifests itself, and if that intent is now being expressed through conversational queries to a chatbot, Amazon would prefer to be in the room.
Still, the gap between possibility and practicality remains wide. Advertisers accustomed to the relative precision of programmatic buying find themselves in territory that feels more like the early days of banner advertising, when metrics were invented after the fact and success was largely a matter of faith.
The machines, for their part, have offered no comment on the arrangement.
Original story published in adage.com: "Amazon becomes a new funnel for buying ChatGPT ads - Ad Age"