The advertising industry has spent decades learning how to reach consumers while they are doing something else — watching television, reading magazines, scrolling through feeds. Now it is learning how to reach them while they are asking questions of a machine, which is either a natural evolution or something slightly different. The jury, as they say, remains out.
Criteo, the commerce media company that has reinvented itself several times since its founding in Paris in 2005, is positioning itself as the preferred route for retail advertisers who want to buy ads inside OpenAI's ChatGPT. The company is offering lower spending minimums, financial incentives, and the ability to connect existing product feeds directly into the system — features that some media buyers say make it a more attractive option than competing platforms.
Ben Kahan, the head of programmatic at Brainlabs, said the setup gives brands "easy flexibility" by eliminating the need to build ads manually for the new environment. "We don't have to set up all of the ads manually," Mr. Kahan said, which is the kind of operational detail that sounds minor until you are the one doing it.
(One imagines the pitch meeting: "What if we made it less annoying?")
The development reflects the broader scramble among demand-side platforms and commerce media companies to establish themselves as the gatekeepers to conversational AI advertising, a category that did not exist eighteen months ago and now has its own trade conference panels. Criteo, which has been publicly traded since 2013 and has weathered various privacy-related disruptions to its core retargeting business, appears to be betting that its existing relationships with retailers will translate into an early advantage.
Whether consumers will welcome product recommendations from the same interface they use to ask about the French Revolution remains, for now, an open question.
Original story published in adweek.com: "EXCLUSIVE: Criteo Cuts ChatGPT Ad Minimums, Offers Incentives to Woo Retailer Brands"