How OpenAI is building the advertising business for ChatGPT
For more than a decade, Dave Dugan helped shape the advertising business at Facebook and Meta. Today, he and his team at OpenAI are building advertising for ChatGPT, a platform that people use in fundamentally different ways from search and social media.
On the DMEXCO Podcast, Dave Dugan gives Verena Gründel exclusive insights into how OpenAI is building this new business: What strategy is OpenAI pursuing? What rules apply to advertising in ChatGPT? And how does the company plan to protect user trust?
Dave Dugan describes the ads team as a startup within OpenAI. Even before the first ad was served, the team defined its core principles. At the heart of them: the user experience.
“People have great trust. They love the experience. So you have to make sure that ads supplement and enhance the experience.”
OpenAI’s approach rests on three principles: Conversational Privacy, Answer Independence, and User Choice and Control. OpenAI aims to withhold conversation details from advertisers, keep organic answers independent of advertising, and label ads clearly.
Why ChatGPT Ads work differently from search and social
According to OpenAI, around 20 percent of ChatGPT queries have commercial intent. Unlike traditional search, however, these queries often go far beyond a handful of keywords. Users describe their situation and specify requirements, budgets, or other parameters. Dave Dugan sees this as a key strength for advertising: more context means greater potential to match ads precisely to the user’s situation.
Dave Dugan also distinguishes ChatGPT from social media: the platform is not designed to maximize the time people spend on it. Instead, users come to ChatGPT with a specific task: ask a question, get an answer, get the job done.
For advertisers, this also means rethinking creative. Rather than optimizing around keywords, ads need to address the specific question:
“The best ads in ChatGPT are those that answer the user's question.”
He describes ChatGPT as a “decision layer” in the funnel: within just a few prompts, users can move from initial research to comparing different options and get close to making a purchase decision. From Dave Dugan’s perspective, this challenges the traditional distinction between brand and performance marketing.
What else you’ll learn in this episode:
- Where budgets for ChatGPT Ads are currently coming from.
- Why CPC has significantly accelerated the adoption of ChatGPT Ads.
- The role of pixels, the Conversions API, and catalog integrations.
- Why B2B and SaaS have surprised OpenAI with their performance.
- How users are responding to advertising in ChatGPT.
- The role of Amazon DSP, Criteo, and other adtech partners.
- How OpenAI sees subscriptions and advertising revenue working together.
- Whether ChatGPT could eventually become a commerce platform itself.
And the conversation continues at DMEXCO 2026: Dave Dugan will take the stage with Ulrich Klenke from Deutsche Telekom to discuss ChatGPT as a new advertising channel and what it means for brands. Want a preview? Tune in to the new episode of the DMEXCO Podcast now!
