OpenAI is sprinting ahead with upgrades for ChatGPT ads.
The AI lab revealed a new raft of releases to advertisers in a Wednesday email reviewed by Business Insider, part of its rapid push to build up a cash-printing ads business from scratch as it explores routes to make more money. ChatGPT users are now guinea pigs for the quickly evolving tool, with new countries coming online and new ad styles in early testing.
The new releases arrive shortly after OpenAI announced in late July that ChatGPT had hit the milestone of 1 billion active users. A company spokesperson confirmed the email’s contents to Business Insider.
OpenAI is launching advertising on ChatGPT in Brazil and Mexico in the coming week, the email said, adding to several other active markets: the US, Canada, the UK, Japan, Korea, Australia, and New Zealand. In July, the company launched the ability for advertisers to target users within geographic areas of a country.
ChatGPT users on Free or Go plans are the only ones who are served ads. They’re now beginning to see a new ad style, with multiple products in a carousel. For now, these carousels are confined to a single advertiser’s products, unlike the Google carousel, which often tops that site’s search results.
OpenAI’s email also announced improvements to the product’s tools for tracking and measuring campaigns, which competitors Google and Meta have been developing for years. Advertisers on ChatGPT can now test ad campaigns that optimize for specific conversions, such as sales or sign-ups. The email also listed new partnerships with the adtech companies Hightouch and Triple Whale, adding more ways to measure an ad campaign’s success.
OpenAI is also signaling that it could roll out “sponsored agents.” While it wasn’t included in the Wednesday email, OpenAI’s latest advertising policies document, updated on July 31, defined “sponsored agents” as “conversational experiences that allow users to interact with an AI-generated representative for an Advertiser’s business, products, or services.” It indicates that the company is testing new ad styles built on generative AI. The OpenAI spokesperson declined to comment on this.
Advertisers see incremental changes to ChatGPT’s ads tool practically every day, Juozas Kaziukėnas, who sold his market intelligence firm about two years ago and closely watches the e-commerce market, told Business Insider.
“The ad product is quite clearly one of the highest priorities for OpenAI, just from the rate and pace of change that is happening,” he said.
Kaziukėnas views the possible foray into an “AI native” ad format as promising for marketers.
“We’ll see if brands actually want that because we often find that despite many experiments from the companies, often advertisers just want traffic back to their sites,” he said.
As popular as ChatGPT has become, OpenAI has a major feat of catch-up ahead. When the company last revealed its annual recurring ads revenue in May, it tallied $100 million. Google and Meta respectively raked in over $294 billion and $196 billion in ads revenue last year.
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