This Future of Marketing Briefing covers the latest in marketing for Digiday+ members and is distributed over email every Friday at 10 a.m. ET. More from the series →OpenAI may be telling marketers to treat ChatGPT as a test channel rather than a performance one but its partner deals, tech builds and measurement moves tell a different story about the advertiser it actually wants. The latest is a deal with commerce media platform Skai, according to two sources with knowledge of it.
Like the Criteo deal before it, the idea is to give advertisers a route into ChatGPT inventory through infrastructure they already use. But where Criteo acts as a demand aggregator, bringing its own advertiser relationships and commerce data directly to OpenAI’s inventory, Skai is a management layer. And crucially, a different kind of buyer sits behind it. Search marketers running campaigns across Amazon, Walmart and Google through Skai may never go near a programmatic platform. For them, the integration adds ChatGPT to a workflow they’re already in every day alongside inventory they already understand.
Skai declined to comment.
“I think OpenAI is trying hard not to become just another inventory source within the programmatic ecosystem or a traditional ad platform,” said Liz DeAngelis, managing director of integrated media at Brainlabs. “Partnering with companies like Skai or Criteo instead positions them much more squarely in the retail and commerce space, while also unlocking valuable shopping and purchase data.”
