The advertising industry has spent decades believing that big brands, with their big budgets and their big agencies, hold sway over the platforms that carry their messages. This belief, while comforting, has not aged especially well.

OpenAI's ChatGPT now counts more than 60,000 advertisers buying space on its platform, according to Dan Salmon, an analyst at New Street Research, who based his findings on an event hosted by OpenAI and AppsFlyer on Oct. 7. That figure is up from 20,000 a little more than a month earlier, and from perhaps a few hundred when the service began accepting advertising in February.

The trajectory, for those keeping score, suggests ChatGPT could surpass half a million advertisers within the next year, a milestone that took Facebook nearly six years to reach. The engine of this growth is the same one that powered Facebook's rise: self-service advertising tools that allow small businesses and direct-to-consumer brands to buy alongside — and eventually outnumber — the Fortune 1,000.

This is where the story becomes less comfortable for Madison Avenue. When small and medium-size businesses surpassed major brand advertisers in their share of Facebook's revenue, the leverage that agencies and holding companies believed they possessed began to evaporate. (The July 2020 boycott, in which the world's largest advertisers temporarily fled the platform, resulted in Facebook's ad revenue rising during the quarter — a detail that perhaps said more than any press release.)

The implication for artificial intelligence platforms is not subtle: if the advertising industry wishes to shape the policies and ethical frameworks of frontier AI companies, the window for doing so is narrowing with each new self-service account activated. Kate Scott-Dawkins, who oversees business intelligence at WPP's GroupM, has described the ad-supported AI marketplace as something approaching "manifest destiny." Her year-end forecast, due in early December, may require updated maps.

At recent industry conferences, speakers have begun using the word "existential" to describe advertising's relationship with AI, which is the sort of word that typically signals either genuine concern or an approaching panel discussion. In this case, it may be both.

Original story published in MediaPost: "The AI Advertising Tipping Point"