Name: The decision is the opportunity: ChatGPT Ads, a new channel for marketers
Uploaded: 2026-08-20T17:16:06.881Z
Duration: 30 min 12 s
Description: The decision is the opportunity: ChatGPT Ads, a new channel for marketers. Topics covered: Welcome to ChatGPT Ads, Building Ads Platform, Ad Safety & Targeting, Advertiser Results, Simplified Ad Onboarding, Intelligent Agent Demo, Conclusion and Next Steps

Transcript for "The decision is the opportunity: ChatGPT Ads, a new channel for marketers": Hi, everyone, and welcome. I'm Christin on the ad solutions team here at OpenAI, and I'm joined by my friend Zo on the ads product team. If you're here today, you're probably curious about how people are using ChatGPT, what the consumer journey looks like, and how to reach people on the platform. What you might find surprising, though, is that the fundamentals of the customer journey are the same on ChatGPT. People are using the platform to discover new products, explore their options, and ultimately decide what to buy. But what is different is that what was once a fragmented journey across different websites, reviews, offline and online channels is now consolidated in ChatGPT. This creates a really unique opportunity for marketers to reach your customers, and we wanna make it as easy as possible for you to get started. So to that point, for anyone who wants to follow along or get started right away, you can find the sign up page at ads.openai.com. Also, scan the QR code on this slide, and eligible advertisers can receive an initial ad credit offer to get started. We'll also share this QR code again at the end. So over the next thirty minutes, we're gonna cover off on how consumer behavior is changing as more people turn to AI to help make decisions. From there, we'll cover how ChatGpT Ads work, how we're building the platform, and finally, how to get started. So to start out, let's ground the conversation in a quick look at how the consumer journey is changing. It's no longer a controversial statement to say that, you know, AI is fundamentally changing consumer behavior. Gen AI platforms have squarely moved from early adoption to mainstream use. And in fact, three and four Gen z and two and three millennials say they use Gen AI tools, indicating they've really become a normal part of consumer behavior. And on ChatGPT, they're often coming with a goal, which can range from anything from discovering something new to solving a problem or getting advice. Take, for example, Zo, who's about to have a second baby. Him and his family are trying to figure out how they're gonna get their new family of four around. And, you know, while Zo never considered himself a minivan guy after using ChatGPT to narrow his options, he discovered a new minivan that is not like the others, at least according to Zo. Or take the example of my new puppy who recently got big enough to start counter surfing and recently grabbed a slice of chocolate cake off the counter. Naturally, I went to chat GPT for advice and learned that based on her weight and the amount of cake, we were not gonna need to make a visit to the emergency vet. What these two examples show is the breadth of conversations happening on the platform. And, you know, unlike other platforms where, you know, maybe you're typically sharing limited context in the form of a keyword, On chat, I'm sharing really rich context. So, for example, in the case of planning a trip to Yosemite, you know, I would share what I want to accomplish, what matters to me, and what constraints I have. And so, you know, not only do we have this wide breadth of conversations happening on the platform, but the depth of conversations happening on the platform provides a really clear picture of what it is that people are trying to accomplish. So when looking at the types of prompts people are putting into OpenAI ChatGPT, it really spans the funnel. So what this means is people are not just showing up during that early discovery phase or right when they're about to make a purchase. We're there throughout the customer journey where each conversation is revealing more context that moves the user closer to a decision. So this creates a really unique opportunity for brands to contribute to the moments when decisions are taking shape. So we're gonna take it back to the Yosemite example one more time. You know, as part of that journey, I might be looking for hiking boots, And what could start is a very simple inquiry about types of boots, I need for my trip could quickly evolve into understanding, you know, what are the right boots for a beginning hiker or maybe I'm comparing features based on my needs and then further narrowing down based on my constraints, so maybe how much I'm willing to spend on hiking boots. This one conversation quickly led to making an informed decision and, you know, a user journey that maybe used to take weeks or even months can now happen in a single conversation. So So what this ultimately means is that we've collapsed the consideration layer. And if your brand isn't showing up when users are considering their options, you risk missing the moment when a customer decides who gets their business. And with a billion weekly active users, these decisions are opportunities that are happening at scale. Thanks, Christin. So Christin shared a little bit about how people are increasingly coming to Chat g p two to make decisions and how that broader consideration journey is coming together in one place on chat. Now I wanted to spend a few minutes talking about exactly how we're building our ads platform and how we're connecting businesses to customers in moments that matter. So we're not just building an ad platform that responds to whatever someone happens to be talking about in that moment right now. We're building a platform that understands the different user journeys a person may be on and can identify the right products, services, or businesses that can help them make progress across any of those user journeys. And Christin already shared this example, and I'm gonna get a little bit more personal here again because these are real examples from my life and and how I've been using Chargebee T over the last few weeks. So over the last few weeks, I've been using Chargebee T for a number of use case use cases. One of those is helping me figure out, like Christin mentioned, which minivan to buy as we're expecting our second child in just a few days, and we're looking for a bigger vehicle for our growing family. I was also using ChatGPT to help me put together a training plan for a five k that I ran earlier this month. And then more recently, I was using ChatGPT to help me plan a weekend getaway to Tahoe with my family. Now each of these are completely different user journeys, but they're all actively things I'm getting help from Chat GPT to work through. Now let's say I'm having a conversation about that Tahoe trip. One relevant ad could be for a local restaurant that looks like the perfect place for me to take my family to as we're spending time there in Tahoe over the weekend. And it makes sense. It's directly related to what I'm talking about. But at the same time, there could be other opportunities that are just as relevant to surface to me in that conversation. For example, it's an ad from a local dealership with the exact minivan I was looking for. Let's say a few days ago when I was having a conversation and I was narrowing down my options, I narrowed into a specific minivan model and a specific trim, model, and color, but I couldn't find one in the right price range. Now let's say a few weeks later, a dealership nearby has the exact same model in the right trim within a price range that I was looking for. Now that's a really relevant ad even though my current conversation happens to be about Tahoe. In the same way vein, you know, maybe it's an Afro running shoe that I've been considering that suddenly goes on sale. Let's say as part of my five k training, I was looking for a shoe that could double up both as a daily trainer and that I could practice it as well as a race day shoe. Now if that exact pair is suddenly 20% off in the right size and in the right color, that's another opportunity to help me make progress on something that I already care about. And that's fundamentally how we've been thinking about building our ads platform, which is around understanding the different user journey someone may be on and finding businesses, products, or services that can help them make progress and take that next step in that user journey. So fundamentally building ads in an ad platform where we're returning ads that are relevant to the person and not strictly just the prompt. Now let's take a look at exactly how this comes to life in the product. You know, in this example, someone is asking ChatGPT for help, in building a fence in their backyard, and they're trying to figure out what materials they'll need. Now here, ChatGPT and the the assistant responds with the information that they're looking for. And then right below that response, there's a clearly labeled sponsored placement for a product or business that can help. And we've designed the experience this way intentionally where the ad is separate from the assistant response, and it doesn't influence the answer that ChatGPT gives. But at the same time, it gives the business a chance to show up in a moment that matters, whether that's a local hardware store, a fencing supplier, or another business that can help the customer customer move forward in that project. Now hopefully, this gives you a better sense of what we're building and why we're so excited about it. But I also wanted to take a quick second to talk about how thoughtfully we're introducing ads into the ChatGPT experience. There are plenty of conversations where an ad can be genuinely helpful, useful, and relevant to the user, But we also have built a number of safeguards in place to make sure that your brand doesn't appear alongside conversations that could be inappropriate or unsafe for your business. We have a detailed set of policies that restrict ads from showing up against topics that we consider to be brand unsafe or brand sensitive. And at the same time, we're just as focused on protecting users and making sure we're not showing ads in conversations that may be sensitive, high stakes, or involve certain health related or personal information. And this is really important to us because we want to build an ad product where we can connect businesses with customers in meaningful moments, but only when it's appropriate to show the ad in the first place. And that balance matters to us because in the long term, the value of our platform depends on people continuing to trust the experience and for businesses to feel confident about where their ads appear. So in addition to ensuring ads only run-in brand safe environments, ads are also only eligible for users 18 plus across our free and our go plans and for both logged in and logged out users. Advertisers also have several tools at their disposal to reach the audiences that matter most to them. So advertisers can apply their own customer or prospect list through our custom audiences. We also offer geo targeting across country, state, DMA, and ZIP code level in The US. And then finally, you can use platform targeting to control which surfaces your campaign delivers on across iOS app, Android app, and web. And OpenAI GPT ads are no longer just a small US pilot. We're live across several global markets. We launched, in The US in February. We've since introduced ads in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, The UK, Japan, and Korea, and most recently in Brazil and Mexico this month, and many more countries, coming in the the next couple of months. So next, I wanted to just share a quick preview of where we're focused in terms of building upon the current ad platform. Phase one of our build out was really focused on just introducing ads while ensuring we maintained user trust, and we feel really good about that. Phase two was about the fundamental. So introducing new markets, refreshing formats, adding product feeds, as well as new targeting and measurement capabilities. As we look ahead, the focus is all about expanding on advertiser value. So through new optimization levers, pacing and bidding controls, deeper audience insights, and more AI native experiences. And, you know, as chat becomes more agentic, the opportunity expands from just helping people evaluate options to helping them take action. As we continue to evolve the platform, we're already seeing encouraging signals from our earliest advertisers. Best Buy, for example, is seeing stronger than expected click through rates suggesting users are engaging with ads in a really meaningful way. Newegg is seeing a three x return on spend across campaigns over a twenty eight day flight and seven x returns on one of their recent seasonal campaigns. And Vistaprint is seeing that much of the traffic from ChatGBT is actually coming from new visitors. And, again, while it's still early, these results point to the same theme, which is that Chat two p t is creating, you know, a new kind of advertising opportunity, one that's built around relevance, intent, and consideration. Thanks, Christin. So I'm really excited to share something that the team has been working on to make it dramatically easier for businesses to get started with advertising on ChatGPT. Now for a lot of small businesses, the biggest barrier to advertising isn't whether or not they want more customers. Of course, they do. But it's finding time to figure out exactly how to work through another advertising platform. So we've reimagined what it looks like to help you get started. And rather than tell you about it, I'm just gonna show you. I'm gonna walk you through a completely new redesigned onboarding experience that helps businesses get their first campaign ready in less than sixty seconds. And a quick caveat before I show you the demo, this is still a new experience that we are rolling out gradually over the next few weeks. So if you don't see this yet on ads.OpenAI.com, sit tight. We'll be making this experience available more broadly in the next few days. So once you go to ads.OpenAI.com and you click on the get started button, instead of being taken to a traditional campaign creation flow, we're gonna take you to a completely new campaign redesign flow where all we're gonna ask you to give us is your website URL for your business. So let's say I put in my website URL for a portable coffee brewer that I have. All I have to do is click add preview, and now a model in the background is understanding what my business is about, what products I'm trying to promote and sell, who my target customers may be, and what user journeys may be appropriate for my ad to surface. And here we are. Now my first chat GBT ad is ready to go. The ad has been auto created alongside an image that we can use along with a title, a subtext that is uniquely designed to help you reach the most customers on the platform. And then you can either confirm these details or you can click on the edit button to make any changes whether it's to the advertiser name, to the title of the ad, to the copy or subtext, as well as the image. And then once you're satisfied with, your final ad copy and creative, you can just hit save and click on review details. This is where we're gonna ask you to just confirm a few final details before we can get your campaign up and running, which includes just verifying and confirming your advertiser name, what location you wanna reach users in, what your bidding strategy is, what your URL is, where you wanna redirect customers from ChatGPT to, and what your average daily budget is. Again, all these pieces of information are prefilled for you, but you always have the the option to edit, any of those fields before you finalize your campaign. Once you're satisfied with your changes, you can hit save and then hit continue. And this is where we'll ask you just a couple of questions to initialize your ad account, which includes clarifying what currency you wanna be billed in, what time zone you wanna see insights in, and what country your business is based based out of. And that's it. And, after this, once you continue to billing and put in your billing information, you're off to the races. We're really excited about this because, you know, with this new experience, we're hoping it becomes drastically easier for advertisers to get up and running on the platform. And that is just the beginning. And I wanted to share a little bit about where we're heading next. Now today, advertising can require learning an entirely new language from campaigns to ad groups to bidding strategies and conversion tracking and reporting and optimization. There is a lot of complexity, and we fundamentally don't believe that level of complexity should stand between you and your next customer. And our vision looking forward is to enable every business with their own intelligent performance marketer that can work alongside them inside Chargebee team codecs, where you could simply tell your agent, hey. Help me bring more customers into my restaurant. I have $500 a month to spend, and I wanna spend no more than $5 for a restaurant reservation. And that's it. The agent could get to work. It can help translate your goals and your preferences and constraints into a campaign. It can start to monitor how that campaign is performing. It can identify opportunities to improve, and it can start to recommend the next set of actions to do. And, you know, this stems from our fundamental belief that you shouldn't have to learn how a new advertising system works under the hood. You should simply be able to explain what you're trying to accomplish, share your constraints, and let an intelligent agent help with the rest. And in a lot of ways, this is similar to a broader shift that we're seeing across AI, where the interface becomes the natural language and the technology handles more of the complexity on your behalf. Now I wanna show you exactly how this can come to life. Let's say you have a business where you sell a portable coffee brewer and you wanna start advertising and reaching customers on ChatTBT. So on ChatGPT, you can go to the plug in section. Within the plug in section, you can search for ads manager where you'll see the ChatGPT ads manager plug in. You can add it. Once you have the plug in, you can start a new conversation where you can invoke the ads manager plug in and give it a set of initial instructions. Here you can tell it to help you make your first ad on Chattopting. The agent initializes and may ask for some confirmation details, like to give, the agent, a landing page URL or a product URL that you're trying to promote. So you can go back to your website. You can pull the relevant URL for, let's say, a Trail Press Brewer that you want to promote and reach customers, with, and you can drop the URL, directly within the conversation. And now once the assistant has this, it can start to look at that landing destination, and it can start to understand exactly what product you're trying to promote, who your target customers may be, and what is the optimal message to reach the the various customers with. And so here, the agent has come up with a few different recommendations. Some at creatives that focus on the portability of the portable brewer, some that focus on how it could be a great option for people who are looking to go camping and want to make a morning cup of coffee, and some were just looking for a new electricity option. And so once you're happy with some of these creative directions, you can simply tell the agent to, to continue, to create the rest of the campaign. And once you do this, the the agent will start to create your first ad preview. And there it is. Your first ad preview is generated, along with additional details to, initialize your first campaign. And once you confirm the rest of your details around who you want your ad to target, what your daily budget is, and what your objective is, That's it. You can tell the agent to hit the ground running, and that's it. You know, it's as simple as that. And now your agent is not just helping you create your first campaign, but over after a few days, you could come back and ask your agent to tell you how your campaign is performing, what ads are performing well, and give you recommendations for where to optimize your budget to next. And so we're really excited for you all to try some of these new capabilities, and we're even more excited for your business to connect with customers in moments that matter. And with that, I'll hand back off to Christin to close this out. It's a very cool demo. So to bring this back to where we started, you know, the fundamentals of the customer journey have not gone away. People still discover, evaluate, compare, and decide. What's changing is that more of that process is happening in conversational AI environments like ChatGPT. Everyone is using these platforms in their day to day lives to explore, accomplish the things that matter to them. So what does this mean for your business? The takeaway is simple. You want your brand to be present where these decisions are taking shape before customers have already made their choice. If you're ready to explore ChatGPT ads, you can scan the QR code here or go to ads.OpenAI.com, and eligible advertisers can receive an initial ad credit offered to get started. Thank you for joining us.