For most of advertising's history, the goal has been reasonably consistent: get a message in front of a person who might buy something. The person might be watching television, reading a magazine, or scrolling through a phone, but there was always, at the end of the chain, a humaneli being with a wallet.
Now some marketers are beginning to wonder whether they should also be pitching to the machines.
The idea of advertising directly to artificial intelligence agents — the chatbots and digital assistants that increasingly answer consumer questions — has moved from theoretical curiosity to active experimentation, according to people at agencies and brands who are exploring the approach. The premise is straightforward enough: if a shopper asks an AI assistant to recommend a good running shoe or a reliable accountant, the brand that gets cited wins.
The execution, however, remains considerably murkier.
"There are no established buying options," said one agency executive who spoke on condition of anonymity because the work is still in early stages. "There's no rate card. There's not even agreement on what we're measuring."
The challenge begins with the fact that AI systems are not, strictly speaking, audiences in any traditional sense. They do not see banner ads. They do not recall jingles. They ingest vast quantities of text and then generate responses based on patterns in that text — which means that brands hoping to influence AI recommendations are really hoping to influence the training data, or the web content the systems consult in real time.
Some marketers have begun working with creators and publishers to seed content that might surface in AI-generated answers, a tactic that resembles search-engine optimization but for a reader that never clicks through.
(Whether this constitutes advertising, public relations, or something else entirely is a question the industry has not yet answered, perhaps because no one wants to be the first to say it out loud.)
For now, the channel remains speculative — a bet on a future that may or may not arrive in the form the bettors imagine.
Original story published in adage.com: "How brands are working with creators to get cited by AI - Ad Age"