Pioneer, the summit where CX leaders redefine what’s possible, is on October 7th.

Join leaders from Fin, Anthropic, and Clay for an insightful conversation on the state of AI transformation.

You’ll discover how some of the most innovative minds in CX have transformed their organizations, learn how they think about CX, and hear how they're planning for what's next.

Join the conversation in San Francisco, or tune in virtually.

Reserve your spot

One of the strangest things about digital advertising is how much of the industry was built around people typing three or four words into a box.

"Running shoes."

"Business insurance."

"Gym near me."

Those tiny fragments became one of the largest advertising businesses in history.

Marketers spent twenty-five years learning how to infer enormous amounts of information from very little.

Someone searched "best CRM."

What are they trying to accomplish?

How big is their company?

What features matter to them?

Are they researching or buying?

What does "best" even mean?

We guessed.

Sometimes extremely profitably.

AI interfaces are starting to remove the need for that guessing.

ChatGPT Ads organizes campaigns around conversational context rather than query strings. At the ad group level, advertisers provide "context hints" describing the conversations, topics or situations where their product may be relevant. OpenAI is explicit that these are not exact-match keywords and do not guarantee delivery in any specific conversation. The system weighs the hint alongside the live conversation, the ad copy and the landing page.

That's a much bigger change than another advertising platform launching.

A search might be:

best running shoes

A conversation might effectively be:

I'm 47. I've started walking every evening and want to start running. I'm heavy, my knees sometimes hurt, I'll mostly be on pavement and I don't want to spend $300 on shoes.

Those are not six better keywords.

That's a different kind of intent signal.

The consumer has supplied the objective, constraints, concerns, context and price sensitivity voluntarily, because doing so improves the answer they receive.

For marketers, that potentially changes the unit we're buying.

Google taught an entire generation of marketers to buy expressions of intent.

AI may allow us to buy situations in which intent exists.

There is an important distinction.

A person searching "CRM software" tells us what they are looking at.

A person explaining that their twelve-person sales team is losing leads because nobody updates Salesforce tells us what problem they are actually trying to solve.

The second is much closer to the business outcome.

That's the theory. Now the part that should slow you down.

Ads in ChatGPT only appear for people on the Free and Go plans. Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Edu accounts are ad-free. Which means the sales operations lead I just described, the one handing over a perfect account of her problem, is among the least likely people alive to see an ad while she does it. B2B buyers skew toward paid tiers.

One agency published its own test honestly: 8,940 impressions, 58 clicks, a 0.65% click-through rate, no leads. Their diagnosis was the audience constraint, not the creative.

So this is a signal worth understanding well before it is a channel worth funding. If you sell to consumers on price and convenience, the audience is there today. If you sell software to sales teams, you are reading about a future that hasn't arrived in your category yet.

There is a second thing worth being clear about, because the framing invites a misread.

You do not get the conversation.

OpenAI does not pass user conversations to advertisers. You write a plain-language description of a customer situation, and the model decides whether your ad belongs in a conversation you will never read. The signal got richer and simultaneously moved further out of your hands.

There is also no negative keyword. No match type. No query report to mine on a Friday afternoon.

On Google, you constrain the system.

On ChatGPT, you brief it and it decides.

Which is the same argument I made last week about Target CPA, arriving from a different direction. The levers keep converting into instructions. What survives is the quality of the instruction and the judgement behind it.

Still, watch what is happening to the interface.

The keyword existed partly because humans needed an efficient way to communicate with a database.

We learned to shorten questions so machines could understand them.

AI reverses that relationship.

Now the machine can handle the whole story.

That means advertising may gradually move from:

What did this person search?

to:

What is this person trying to accomplish?

And that changes more than targeting.

It changes creative. It changes offers. It changes measurement. It changes the way we categorize audiences.

It changes landing pages most of all, and not in the way you would expect. OpenAI's system weighs your landing page when deciding whether to serve your ad at all, through a relevance-weighted auction. A thin page that doesn't match the promise in your ad is now a distribution problem before it is ever a conversion problem.

The marketer who wins in that environment probably isn't the person with the world's best keyword spreadsheet.

It's the person who understands the customer well enough to recognize the moment when the product becomes useful.

Keywords were always proxies for intent.

We just got so good at buying the proxy that we forgot what we were actually looking for.

Source note: ChatGPT Ads currently supports CPM, CPC and conversion-optimized CPC objectives, geographic targeting, custom audiences built from email and phone lists, and context hints at the ad group level. Measurement runs through the OpenAI Pixel, a Conversions API and third-party integrations. OpenAI announced the European expansion on August 18 and ads went live across 31 markets on August 24, bringing the total to 35 countries. Access is through OpenAI's Ads Solutions team, agency partners and technology partners first, with self-serve Ads Manager to follow. Ads are shown only to users on the Free and Go plans.