Advertisers treated OpenAI’s ad pilot like a bet on the future. The question now is how long they’re willing to wait for it to pay off.So far, it has not been an easy wait. Since the pilot launched in February, advertisers have reported chronic underdelivery — campaigns falling well short of their targeted impressions, leaving budgets unspent and results hard to justify, according to several ad execs, who all asked to remain anonymous due to the sensitivities around the test.
One of them spent just $2,500 of a $250,000 commitment over four weeks, receiving 200 clients in the process. The others described similar experiences, with another agency exec saying that when their first ads went live in February, almost nothing happened for close to a month. The inventory was, to put it plainly, barely there.
The frustration came into sharp relief at last month’s Digiday Programmatic Summit in Palm Springs.
A senior exec from a major agency told Digiday that OpenAI could only push through roughly $100 per client per week until supply began opening up around mid-April. In a town hall session, attendees were more blunt. “I think they got revenue blind and did a lot of things before they were ready,” said one. Another put the problem in structural terms “Less than 10% of the eligible base was part of the pilot. We just had massive scale issues in general.”
