The phrase "move fast and break things" has never been the official motto of the advertising business, which prefers to move deliberately and bill hourly. OpenAI, the artificial intelligence company that has spent the past two years moving quite fast indeed, appears to have absorbed this lesson as it builds out its nascent advertising operation inside ChatGPT.
The company has now opened its ads manager to advertisers in the United States, including small businesses, startups and the holding company giants — Dentsu, Omnicom, Publicis and WPP are all part of the beta program. It is the largest expansion since OpenAI began selling advertising three months ago, when a handful of large partners were invited to test the waters.
The waters, it should be said, remain shallow by design. Advertisers can currently reach users in what OpenAI calls a "limited set" of categories: household goods, travel, entertainment, local services and education. These are the sort of categories that rarely attract regulatory scrutiny or user complaints. (What, you were expecting cryptocurrency and weight loss pills?)
The measurement capabilities remain similarly modest. Cost-per-click bidding has arrived. Cost-per-action bidding is "in motion," according to Shivakumar Venkataraman, the company's vice president of advertising, though he declined to specify when it might actually arrive. A conversion tracking pixel is live; a conversions API is in development.
"By adding things like an ads manager, CPC bidding, pixel measurement and CAPI, OpenAI is demonstrating that it understands the basic building blocks that are necessary for advertisers to feel comfortable testing on ChatGPT," said Debra Aho Williamson, founder and chief analyst at Sonata Insights.
The company has been notably particular about maintaining control over ad delivery. Partners like Adobe, Criteo and Kargo handle the buying and bidding; OpenAI decides where ads actually appear. The concern, apparently, is that a poorly placed ad in a sensitive conversation could erode the trust that makes ChatGPT's data valuable in the first place.
For now, the ads themselves are confined to a single format: a small favicon accompanied by text. OpenAI executives have said, in forums ranging from press briefings to pitch meetings, that advertiser return on investment comes second to user experience.
It is the kind of statement that sounds principled in a beta test and rather more complicated at scale.
Original story published in Digiday: "OpenAI opens up ChatGPT ads manager to the U.S. while promising third-party measurement, CPA bidding"