TL;DROpenAI made its Cannes Lions debut pitching ChatGPT as the next big ad platform, but its initial $60 CPM halved in ten weeks. The company projects $100 billion in ad revenue by 2030 while Anthropic and Google keep their chatbots ad-free.
OpenAI made its debut at the Cannes Lions advertising festival this week, but it did not book a beach club on the Croisette alongside Meta, Amazon, and Google. Instead, the company summoned reporters and agency executives to a semi-secluded villa near the harbour, a staging choice that doubles as metaphor: OpenAI is in the ad business, just not in the way the incumbents are.
The pitch was led by David Dugan, a former Meta executive who spent more than twelve years as vice president of global clients and agencies before joining OpenAI as VP of advertising earlier this year. He told attendees the company has already attracted “thousands of advertisers” and that the strongest-performing categories are travel, retail, health, beauty, and financial services.
The revenue gamble
OpenAI began testing sponsored links at the bottom of ChatGPT responses on 10 February, starting with free-tier and Go-plan users in the US. The ads have since expanded to seven countries, including the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and South Korea, with plans to add Brazil and Mexico in the coming weeks.
