OpenAI Pitches ChatGPT Ads as ‘Super Intentional’ at Cannes

CANNES, FRANCE – OpenAI is making its first official appearance at the Cannes Lions festival this week, pitching major brand marketers on an ad platform that is just four months old. The company is framing its offering as a shift from an attention-based economy to what it calls an "intelligence economy," where users conduct deeper, more purposeful queries inside ChatGPT.

"The big difference is, for our app, people come in with a job to be done," said David Dugan, OpenAI's head of global ads solutions, during a media briefing on Monday. "It's super intentional. They give us information about a problem they're trying to solve and it's a perfect context for a marketer to deliver a targeted ad solution to them."

ChatGPT ads entered testing in February and have since scaled to seven markets, including Japan and South Korea as of last week. Latin American markets like Brazil and Mexico are next. The ads appear as a sponsored box below the chatbot's organic answers. OpenAI has introduced both cost-per-thousand impression and cost-per-click bidding models. The latter has quickly grown popular, Dugan said.

Criteo, an early ad-tech partner, said Monday that over 2,000 brands are now advertising on ChatGPT through its platform. Criteo and StackAdapt have lowered spending minimums in recent weeks, according to Adweek, which could drive further adoption. OpenAI has also rolled out a self-service ads manager.

Roughly 20% of queries in ChatGPT carry direct commercial intent, according to Dugan. That positions the platform in the middle of the marketing funnel, when consumers are comparing products and researching more deeply. OpenAI is also eyeing the upper funnel. A user researching the best time of year for a family trip to the Swiss Alps is not showing direct purchase intent, the query signals predictive possibilities for marketers.

"If an advertiser can get in front of that conversation and introduce themselves at the right moment, there's going to be value there," Dugan said. "That upper-funnel piece is going to be a little bit harder to measure. It's just something that is new to the industry."

Marketers value ChatGPT for its scale, per Dugan. Some customers have told OpenAI they receive higher-quality traffic from ChatGPT campaigns versus other channels. Refining the call to action is proving effective. When the CTA is positioned as a benefit or a direct response to the user's original question, response rates are much higher than simply listing the product name, Dugan said.

One closely watched metric is the cross-out rate – when a user hits the X button to dismiss an ad. That rate has dropped 50% since launch, according to Dugan. OpenAI faced criticism for introducing ads at all. Dugan said the decision has not hurt the user experience. ChatGPT ads run on the free and cheaper Go tiers, which together make up the majority of the audience.

"So far, the main takeaway has been there's been no degradation in user behavior if they're exposed to an ad," Dugan said during a Q&A portion of the briefing. "That gives us confidence that ads are working and it's not having any negative impact on behavior."

The push into advertising comes as ChatGPT prepares for a hotly anticipated initial public offering. Advertising will likely be a key part of OpenAI's revenue narrative, especially as the company faces sharper scrutiny over the astronomical costs of AI development. Revenue from ads could also subsidize other features, like eventually giving free-tier users more image uploads per day, Dugan said.

OpenAI executives outlined four principles aimed at maintaining user trust: keeping sponsored ads separate from organic chat responses; not sharing conversational information with advertisers; preserving user choice and control, such as allowing users to clear their ChatGPT history; and delivering long-term value.

The company also emphasized it is not going it alone. Ahead of the festival, OpenAI announced a partnership with data-collaboration platform LiveRamp, adding to a roster that already includes Criteo, Adobe, StackAdapt, and major agency holding companies. LiveRamp's initial focus is allowing advertisers to use its Conversions API Hub for extending measurement beyond browser-based tracking.

"The AI companies have realized it's much easier to just start with an infrastructure that exists and works to access the partners, the advertisers, the information they need," said LiveRamp CEO Scott Howe in an interview. "It felt like a natural outgrowth of all of the things we do already."

OpenAI executives also tried to allay concerns that the company's ad and AI workflow ambitions threaten the creative talent that has historically driven Cannes Lions. Feelings on AI at the festival have been mixed. That has not cooled the hype for ChatGPT.

"The feedback that I've gotten from the agencies is they're excited to have a new platform to experiment with," Dugan said. "I think they understand the fact that the level of context that we get is different from other platforms that are out there, and they're getting the fact that this is not a keyword-based buy, so it's different from traditional search."