OpenAI didn’t make its Cannes Lions debut from a Croisette rooftop or in a branded beach club.
Instead, the company summoned a small group of reporters late Monday morning to a semi-secluded outdoor patio located a roughly 15 minutes walk from the festival’s main center of gravity.
It was a rather sedate way to unveil what Dave Dugan, OpenAI’s head of global ads solutions, called “an entirely new ads product [and] an entirely new experience.”
“Why does someone open the ChatGPT app?” Dugan asked the (very sweaty) reporters taking notes in the 90-degree heat. “They want to do research, they want to solve a problem, they want to get information on a particular topic. They’re not coming to ChatGPT to scroll.”
It’s an interesting line coming from a longtime Meta executive, a company that helped define the art of stopping thumbs mid-scroll. Before joining OpenAI in April, Dugan spent more than 12 years at Meta, most recently as VP of global clients and agencies.
