ChatGPT Ads - A new playbook for brands
The way people discover and buy products is about to change fundamentally. OpenAI's Head of Monetisation, Asad Awan, recently laid out the company's advertising vision on the OpenAI podcast — and for brands that advertise today, the implications are significant.
The user experience comes first. Unlike traditional digital advertising, where ads interrupt content or are wedged between search results, ChatGPT's ad model is built around relevance and trust. Ads will surface as recommendations within conversations, designed to feel useful rather than disruptive. Paid subscribers won't see ads at all, and sensitive topics — health, politics — are excluded entirely. Conversations are never shared with advertisers. OpenAI is betting that protecting user trust is what makes the ad product worth buying in the first place.
Discovery is no longer search-led. Today, brands win by bidding on keywords and optimising for clicks. In ChatGPT's model, a user might simply ask for a recommendation and the AI surfaces the most relevant product — without the user ever typing a brand name. For example: Allbirds didn't target "sustainable shoe buyers"; the AI identified tech designers as their audience automatically. For brands, this means the old logic of keyword ownership and search dominance becomes far less relevant.
Creative and messaging must do more. When an ad appears as a conversational recommendation, generic brand copy will not cut through. Brands will need to think about how their product story translates inside a dialogue — what problem it solves, for whom, and why right now. The ad unit is no longer a banner or a sponsored listing; it is an answer.
Small enterprises will be more competitive. Awan's vision explicitly targets small businesses currently priced out of performance marketing by the cost of specialist expertise. As prompt-based campaign management lowers that barrier, established brands could find themselves competing with a far larger pool of agile, direct-to-consumer challengers.
The brands that adapt earliest — building richer product data, sharper audience narratives, and trust-led creative — will be best positioned when ChatGPT's ad marketplace scales. The best ad won't be the highest bid. It will be the most useful answer to the question.
Of course, Asad and Open AI are setting out a vision, there will be plenty of twists and turns before this ad solution becomes operational.
