Chat GPT Ads Could Be The Biggest Opportunity Since Facebook Ads

OpenAI just made one of the biggest moves in digital advertising history — and almost nobody is talking about it.

In this episode, we break down why ChatGPT’s new ad platform rollout could seriously disrupt Google and Meta’s dominance in the ad world, and why the window to get ahead of this shift may only last a few weeks.

You’ll learn:
- Which new countries are getting ChatGPT ads next
- Why OpenAI’s rapid expansion signals something much bigger
- How ChatGPT’s conversational, intent-driven model changes advertising forever
- Why Google’s business model is suddenly under pressure
- How Meta could lose performance marketing budget to OpenAI
- The real numbers behind ChatGPT’s explosive ad revenue growth
- The privacy and regulatory risks OpenAI now faces
- What smart marketers should be doing right now before the platform becomes saturated

If you run ads, own a business, work in marketing, or simply want to understand where the future of digital advertising is heading, this episode will help you stay ahead of the curve.

The AI advertising race has officially started.

Transcript

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OpenAI just put Google and Meta on notice and almost no marketer is paying attention right now. In the next few minutes, I'm going to show you exactly what's been announced this week and why it's a much bigger deal than the headlines make it sound out to be. Because the window to be early on this is to be measured in weeks, not years. So here's what's happened. And those countries include the UK, Brazil, South Korea, Japan, and Mexico. Those join the four markets where the ads are currently live Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States. And in the US specifically, things are even further along. Advertisers can reach both users who are logged into ChatGPT and who aren't logged in. And OpenAI has opened up its self-serve ad platform to users of all budgets. So what this now means is a small business owner in Ohio can now buy ChatGPT ads just like they would be able to on Google and Meta. OpenAI's head of global ad solutions, Dave Dugan, explained it as expanding thoughtfully, staying focused on answer independence, privacy, and user control. Which is the kind of thing that you say when you know the optics matter. Now, if you're from a country like the UK where these ads are being rolled out, don't rush to set this account up yet because I tried yesterday and I got this message which says the ads are not currently rolled out in your country because the five new countries that have been announced, the ads aren't live yet. OpenAI specifically said over the coming weeks. But this moment matters and it is the time to be prepared because this acts as the smoking gun. So the smart marketers are going to start prepping now for when these ads do roll out in these new countries. So to understand why this matters, you have to look at what OpenAI has done in the last six weeks. They hired a head of global ads solutions, they announced tech partnerships, they built out measurement infrastructure for third-party verification, they reduced the pricing, they launched the self-serve ads platform, and now they're going international. So six big announcements in just six weeks. That is not a company who is running a cautious experiment. They are shifting gears and really evolving in this rapidly evolving AI tech space. And remember, the original ChatGPT ads pilot launched on just February the 9th of this year. So within just three months, OpenAI has launched this small experiment to now rolling this out globally. So that speed tells you everything you need to know about what they are seeing in the data. As Jai Armin from Jellyfish put it, they want as much data as they can get. What works, what doesn't, what drives clicks, and what kind of content they should give preference to. And they're building this out in public in real time. Now let's talk about who actually loses sleep over this, who gets most effective. Now, it's probably gonna be Google more than anyone. Google's entire empire, over 200 billion dollars in ad revenue per year, was built on one behavior. You have intent, you type a few keywords into the search box, an ad appears next to the answer. If that ad gets clicked, Google gets paid. And that model has single-handedly been the most profitable invention in the history of advertising. But ChatGPT just massively disrupted that model because people aren't just typing the best running shoes for flat feet anymore. They're writing three paragraphs explaining their injuries, their training history, their budget, and they're asking Chat GPT for something very specific. So it's way more contextual and personalized than anything Google has ever done. So Google quickly saw this and their response was to roll out AI overviews. And it's the main reason why they're pushing Gemini into every product. But there's one fundamental problem with these AI overviews, and it's that every answer that Google AI generates takes away from potential clicks on ads which pay their bills. So what Google is doing is essentially cannibalizing themselves to compete with OpenAI. Whereas OpenAI has none of that baggage. So even if just 10% of high-intense search inquiries migrate over from Google to Chat GPT, that is a conservative number, 10%. You're talking $20 billion a year of ad revenue up for grabs. So now let's talk about meta ads and how this is going to be affected. Now, meta ads is different to Google because Google is a search-based intent. Meta relies purely on discoverability and not people who are actively looking for the product. You essentially set your targeting parameters and the algorithm serves the ads to people who it thinks are most relevant, and you get impressions and clicks and hopefully purchases from your ads. So again, this is a totally different way of serving ads to Chat GPT's intent-driven model. But here's the thing when a company has a performance marketing budget, it tends to be a fixed budget. So what that means is every platform is essentially competing for a share of the performance marketing budget that each company has. So of course, if there are more ad platforms to compete with, then it's advertising dollars which may get taken away from Meta towards OpenAI's ads. And Meta has been the default home for direct response ads for the last decade. However, the CPMs on Meta have been increasing significantly over the years because of an increased demand from advertisers, but a lack of supply. There are only so many eyeballs on Meta, so the more advertisers pour into the platform, the more the CPMs rise. And what this means for ChatGPT is they have a model which is new, less saturated, so cheaper, and more intent focused and conversational. So what this means is some of that performance marketing budget will be taken from Meta and moved over to OpenAI. And depending on how it performs, maybe a lot of it will be taken. So let's ground this in accurate numbers because so far this has been just predictions. So since ChatGPT opened their first pilot ad platform on February the 9th of this year, their monthly ad revenue has been around $109 million. That's according to data from AdClarity, and this is just within three months. ASAF Tovell from Buy Science, the company who owns AdClarity, says it will likely climb to around $500 million per month. And OpenAI's own internal target is that by the end of next year, they predict $2.5 billion in ad revenue. To put that into perspective, it took TikTok's ad platform years to reach that kind of revenue. And OpenAI is targeting it within just 18-month time window. And that target is exactly why they are opening up more markets faster for more advertisers. Because $2.5 billion is not coming just from the US alone. Athena's CMO Ashley Fletcher said when he asked a room of about 150 senior marketers in the UK whether they wanted to get ready for Chat GPT ads, every single hand went up. So the appetite is real. Now I want to be honest with you about the risks because this is not a guaranteed win for OpenAI. And the risks can affect you as an advertiser as well. ChatGPT conversations are more personal and intimate than anything Google or Meta has built an ads platform on. People are using the LLM to work through their medical decisions, their financial issues, their relationship problems. So what that means is this data which makes those conversations commercially viable is essentially a regulatory minefield. If they move too fast on targeting and personalization, let's say serving an ad to someone based on a private health concern that they may have, the trust and essentially privacy that underpins the whole platform gets fractured or move too slow, and the time it is going to take, the revenue gap between now and the two and a half billion dollar revenue goal widens. There is no clean path between the two. It is just something that AI is going to have to keep making in public with regulators watching. Alex Tate from Entropy Consulting put it well. In a conversational environment like this, if advertisers can't demonstrate results, budget simply won't follow. So OpenAI has to thread two needles at once to be able to build something that regulators are comfortable with and build something that advertisers can prove is driving impact. And that is the tricky balance to find. Okay, so what do you do about all this? Well, there are essentially five things you should be doing. The first one is if you're in an eligible country like the US, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, get into the ads manager this week. Build your account, run a small test budget, even a few hundred dollars of ad spend before the competition floods in is gonna give you data which is gold. Number two is if you're from the UK, Brazil, Japan, Korea, or Mexico, your job for the next few weeks is to prepare. Look, the marketers that got into Google Ads in 2002 or got into Meta in 2012 weren't necessarily better marketers, they didn't have better ads necessarily, but they moved early. And this is the key here. This window of opportunity that we have now, before all of the competition floods into the platform, is gonna close faster than most people would expect. So you don't want to be the one telling the story in five years that you wish you started today. So that's a wrap for today's video, guys. If you found this video valuable, make sure you subscribe to the channel if you haven't already and smash that thumbs up button. If you want to book an intro call with me where we can talk about your business and how I could potentially guide you and advise you on the best course of action to take, then click the link in the description of this video and I'll be happy to speak with you. Until next time, peace.