Credit: Amazon Amazon will let advertisers buy ads in ChatGPT through its own advertising platform. Amazon Ads announced the partnership with OpenAI in a blog post on 10 September. Select US advertisers are already testing it in a pilot. Advertisers who plan and run campaigns with Amazon Ads can now extend them to ChatGPT, the company said.
Annie Palmer reported the deal for CNBC, and Catherine Perloff for The Information. How the ads will work Brands buy the placements through Amazon DSP, Amazon’s demand-side platform for programmatic ads. They do not have to deal with OpenAI directly, TechRadar reported. Advertisers can pay per click or per thousand impressions.
Amazon sets up and manages the campaigns, an Amazon spokesperson told CNBC. OpenAI’s ad system makes every decision about which ads are delivered. The ads appear as text or images beneath ChatGPT’s answers. OpenAI has said its ads sit below the end of a response and are “clearly labeled” as sponsored.
CNBC gave an example. A user asking ChatGPT for marathon training tips could see an ad for running shoes sold on Amazon. What Amazon and its first advertiser said Chris Conetta is director of omnichannel supply at Amazon DSP. “Conversational ads represent the fastest growing engagement opportunity for brands to reach new and existing audiences,” he said in the announcement. With access to ChatGPT Ads, he added, advertisers can extend their campaigns to where customers spend time in conversational chat platforms.
Delta Vacations, the airline’s holiday packages business, is one of the brands in the trial. “We’re proud to be among the first brands testing this new approach,” said its president, Katrin Koenig. She said the company would use “deep consumer insights” to decide how and when Delta Vacations appears in ChatGPT ads. Amazon Ads sells programmatic advertising across Amazon’s own properties and the open internet. The company says the platform draws on “trillions of proprietary browsing, shopping, and streaming signals”.
It says it delivers results without relying on ad identifiers. OpenAI’s ad business so far OpenAI began selling sponsored placements in ChatGPT in the US in February, CNBC reported. Its first advertisers included the retailers Best Buy and Williams-Sonoma. OpenAI said in February that ChatGPT had 900 million weekly active users.
At the end of August, OpenAI said the ad business had reached a $1bn annualised revenue run rate. In August, OpenAI said it would bring ChatGPT ads to 31 European markets. Until now, advertisers bought ChatGPT ads through OpenAI’s own interface or through smaller ad-tech partners such as Criteo and Kargo, The Information reported. In April, TNW reported that OpenAI was hiring ad-tech firms to build conversational ad formats.
Amazon’s ad business is far larger. TechRadar, citing Marketing Dive, described it as the third-largest digital advertising business, with about $70bn in annual ad revenue. Amazon and AI shopping Amazon has heavily restricted access to its own store from AI platforms such as ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini, CNBC reported. It has invested in its own AI shopping tools instead.
In August, a US court let Perplexity’s AI agent shop on Amazon, overturning a ban. Amazon has also been a ChatGPT advertiser itself. It began buying ads on ChatGPT in recent months, according to CNBC. Data from the market intelligence firm Sensor Tower show it was the top retail advertiser on the platform between April and August.
Other companies are building shopping into ChatGPT too. Synchrony, the card issuer, wants its Amazon and Walmart store cards to work inside ChatGPT. The two companies already have a financial tie. Amazon agreed in February to invest $50bn in OpenAI, starting with $15bn, according to Amazon.
The rest, $35bn, depended on conditions being met. The Information has reported that Amazon completed that second tranche. Under the same partnership, Amazon said OpenAI’s offerings would be available through its Bedrock cloud service and would use its Trainium chips. Also tagged with
