What advertising on ChatGPT could look like
Display Advertising, Homepage Takeovers, and Sponsored Responses à la Google Search Ads
What advertising on ChatGPT could look like
Back in May, the Information reported that:
OpenAI has hired Shivakumar Venkataraman, a 21-year Google veteran who previously led the company’s search ads business, according to his LinkedIn profile. He joined OpenAI as a vice president earlier this month, his profile says.
This got me thinking, what would advertising on ChatGPT look like. Using my rudimentary design skills, I decided to mock up a few ideas in Canva.
Display advertising
The most straightforward and easiest form of advertising for ChatGPT to rollout would be display ads. There are numerous ad exchanges and ad tech platforms that would happily partner with OpenAI to provide display advertising for the 100 million users who use ChatGPT weekly.
The most common form of display advertising is banner ads, like the one in my mockup below. However, there are also video ads, rich media ads, and dynamic ads.
From a targeting perspective, it would be possible to enable:
Retargeting — Using a cookie or pixel, advertisers can retarget anyone who visits their website.
Keyword Targeting — By identifying certain keywords, advertisers could run display ads to their target audience. For example, a dog food company could target someone asking ChatGPT, “What is kibble made of?”
Customer List Upload — This involves advertisers uploading a list of their customers' data (e.g., name, email, phone number), which is then matched with any data that ChatGPT has (e.g., the email you signed up with).
Homepage Takeover
A more extreme version of display advertising is a homepage takeover. The goal of a homepage takeover is to capture the attention of the website's entire audience, making it a powerful tool for brand awareness and engagement.
In the mockup below, I’ve used actual banner ads that were used to create a takeover of The Guardian.
This type of advertising would appear the first time a user opens ChatGPT and would disappear either after a few seconds or as soon as the user starts typing into the message box.
Takeover ads have actually been adopted by social media channels such as Snapchat with their First Story offering and TikTok with their TopView ad unit.
Sponsored Responses à la Google Search Ads
It seems almost inevitable that OpenAI would roll out sponsored response ads, similar to Google Search Ads, especially after hiring Google’s former VP of Search Ads.
In my mockup below, I asked ChatGPT the following question: “What is the best accounting software in Australia?” In its reply, it listed six options:
Xero
MYOB
QuickBooks Online
Reckon
Sage
Wave
You can easily imagine ChatGPT turning the first position into a sponsored response, allowing advertisers to bid on it in an auction-based system. Additionally, ChatGPT could enable a hyperlink, but only for the first position, ensuring the advertiser can direct traffic to their website and further track users.
Let me know in the comments how you think advertising on ChatGPT could look.
Things that caught my attention
Why China Banned Homework — this video from PolyMatter is eye opening.
Passionfroot — is an “all-in-one tool to help creators do more brand deals - easier, and faster.” It currently offers a storefront, booking system, sponsored collaborations workflows, and analytics.