There was a time, not so long ago, when Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, spoke of advertising with the mild distaste usually reserved for expired dairy products. The company, he suggested, would find other ways to make money.

That was then.

OpenAI announced this week that it is introducing a self-serve advertising platform called Ads Manager, allowing marketers to register accounts, set budgets, upload creative and monitor campaigns — the full apparatus of modern digital advertising, now available inside the same system that writes poetry and explains complex math problems to confused parents.

The company, which began testing ads on ChatGPT in February with brands including Target, Albertsons and Williams-Sonoma, is also expanding its pilot program to Britain, Mexico, Japan, Brazil and South Korea. OpenAI has said it expects to generate $2.5 billion in advertising revenue this year, with reported ambitions of reaching $100 billion by 2030. (For context, that would put the company roughly in the neighborhood of Google's current advertising business, though Google has had a head start of about two decades.)

The new platform includes cost-per-click bidding and what the company calls Conversions API, which allows advertisers to track what happens after someone sees an ad — a purchase, a signup, a lead. OpenAI has been working with the major agency holding companies, including Dentsu, Omnicom, Publicis and WPP, along with technology partners like Adobe and Criteo, to integrate the offering into workflows that media buyers already know.

The moves come as Google's Gemini and its AI Mode are projected to surpass ChatGPT in users this year, according to forecasts from Emarketer, creating the kind of competitive pressure that tends to make advertising look less like a philosophical compromise and more like a necessary revenue stream.

In late April, OpenAI quietly updated its privacy policy to include language about receiving purchase data from advertisers and sharing user information with marketing partners. The filing cabinet, it seems, is being reorganized.

Original story published in Marketing Dive: "OpenAI solidifies ad platform ambitions with ChatGPT Ads Manager"