The advertising industry has spent more than a century trying to answer the question attributed to John Wanamaker: which half of his advertising budget was wasted? Now the question has a sequel: which half of the artificial intelligence budget?
OpenAI, the San Francisco company whose ChatGPT service has become something of a cocktail-party verb, is moving to provide at least a partial answer. The company said it was integrating with AppsFlyer, a mobile attribution and marketing analytics platform, to bring measurement tools to advertisements running inside its chatbot. The arrangement will allow brands to track installs, in-app purchases, and subscriptions — the sort of data that has become table stakes in mobile advertising but that had been notably absent from OpenAI's nascent ad product.
Grubhub, the food delivery service that is part of the Just Eat Takeaway empire, is among more than 40 brands that have been testing the integration for the last four weeks. The roster also includes advertisers in ecommerce and ride-sharing, categories whose entire business models depend on knowing whether an ad led to an action or merely to a shrug.
Brian Ryu, Grubhub's vice president of growth and paid media, said the company had been in the ChatGPT advertising pilot since February, when OpenAI first opened it to advertisers, but had been working with what he called a "limited picture" on conversions and attribution. The company was "missing a huge chunk of what was happening before," Mr. Ryu told Adweek.
(One imagines the chunk was not small.)
The integration suggests that OpenAI, having built something people want to talk to, is now trying to build something advertisers are willing to pay for — which, in this industry, has always required proving that the money went somewhere other than into the ether.
Original story published in adweek.com: "Grubhub and 40 Other Brands Test In-App Measurement in ChatGPT Ads"