OpenAI has an ads manager. It’s in testing and may not launch in lockstep with the ad business itself — something the company has been at pains to stress to partners. But that’s not really the point. The point is that it exists. Which is historically unusual. This kind of ad tech tends to arrive well into the life of an ad business, not at the start of one. Meta, Twitter and Snapchat all followed the same arc: ads first, self-serve managers years later, once demand had been proven.
The one exception was Google, where Adwords and its self-serve manager launched together in 2000. It went on to become one of the most profitable ad businesses ever built.
OpenAI’s execs have clearly taken notes because the upside is hard to ignore. An ads manager turns an ad business from a series of direct deals into a self-serve marketplace — one where advertisers set budgets, target audiences and measure results without a salesperson in the room. That’s what it did for Google. The question is whether OpenAI can make the same case.
For now, at least, it looks the part. The ads manager bears a passing resemblance to Google’s own, according to a video of the dashboard that Digiday reviewed. Whether the functionality follows is another matter.
