After Google and social media, a great new terrain is emerging for digital ADV: conversations with AI. ChatGPT Ads promises advertisers an audience with a much more defined intent, but it also opens up new questions about trust, transparency and the future of online information.
From August 24th ChatGPT introduces advertising also in Italy. The news, communicated directly by OpenAI, concerns 31 European markets including Germany, France, Spain, Sweden and the Netherlands, and marks a transition that until recently seemed unthinkable for a product born as a pure conversational assistant.
Ads will appear exclusively for plan users Free and Gowhile subscribers to Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Edu are completely excluded. In short, those who pay will continue to work without advertising interruptions. Those who use the free version, however, will begin to see sponsored messages positioned under the system’s responses, with a label that clearly identifies them as paid content.
How ad selection works
The mechanism, explains OpenAI, works separately from the text generation model. This means that the system that chooses which advertising to show is not the same one that processes the answers to user questions, and that advertisers have no possibility to influence the content generated by ChatGPT.
In Europe there is also an important difference compared to the American experimentation. Advertising will initially be contextual: the ad will be chosen based on the topic and intent of the conversation, while personalization based on additional user experience signals requires relevant consent.
Sensitive or regulated conversations and accounts of those under 18 are excluded from the advertising program. It is a technical detail that however tells something much more important. When we use ChatGPT we are not simply typing a keyword.
We are explaining to a machine what we want to do. We can tell her the type of trip we are looking for, the budget, our preferences, the constraints. We can ask her which car to buy, which computer to choose, which software to use or how to furnish a house. A method that seems decidedly interesting for those who want to do digital advertising.
The broader meaning of change
Behind the announcement there is a sentence that OpenAI used to explain its position: “In the attention economy, it was essential for brands to be interesting; in the intelligence economy, they must be usefulIt is an effective summary of what is happening to the online advertising market.
For twenty years, digital advertising has been based on capturing attention: the more time a user spent on a page, the more value it generated for those selling advertising space. ChatGPT overturns this mechanism.
People don’t scroll through a feed looking for entertainment, but ask specific questions with a concrete goal in mind, whether it’s choosing software, organizing a trip or furnishing a home.
This means that advertising, to work in this context, must fit into a decision-making moment that is already underway, without distracting or interrupting. A change that forces brands to rethink not only where to invest, but how to communicatefavoring the clarity of the offer over the creativity of the commercial.
It remains to be seen to what extent this model will be able to coexist with the trust that people place in an assistant like ChatGPT precisely because it is perceived as impartial. The most delicate challenge for OpenAI will not be technical but one of perception: demonstrating that the introduction of advertising does not affect the reliability of the answers that millions of users consult every day.
